Surrealist Ghostliness-University of Nebraska Press (2013)

Surrealist Ghostliness
SURREALIST
GHOSTLINESS
Katharine Conley
University of Nebraska Press

Lincoln and London
© 2013 by the Board of Regents of
the University of Nebraska
Acknowledgments for the use of

previously published material appear
on page xx, which constitutes an
extension of the copyright page.
All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America
Publication of this volume was assisted

by funds from the Arts & Humanities
Division for the Faculty of Arts &
Sciences at Dartmouth College.
Library of Congress
Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Conley, Katharine, 1956–
Surrealist ghostliness / Katharine Conley.
pages cm Includes bibliographical
references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8032-2659-3
(hardback : alk. paper)
1. Surrealism — Themes, motives. I. Title.
NX456.5.S8C66 2013
709.04'063 — dc23 2012049901
Set in Minion by Laura Wellington.

Designed by Nathan Putens.
For Marian, who helped me see ghostliness
And for Richard, always
List of Illustrations viii
Preface xi
Acknowledgments xvii
Introduction 1
Contents 1 The Cinematic Whirl of Man
Ray’s Ghostly Objects 21
2 Claude Cahun’s Exploration of the
Autobiographical Human 45
3 The Ethnographic Automatism
of Brassaï and Dalí’s
Involuntary Sculptures 69
4 The Ghostliness in Lee Miller’s
Egyptian Landscapes 91
5 Dorothea Tanning’s Gothic
Ghostliness 119
6 Francesca Woodman’s
Ghostly Interior Maps 151
7 Pierre Alechinsky’s Ghostly
Palimpsests 179
8 Susan Hiller’s Freudian Ghosts 201
Conclusion 227
Notes 233
Bibliography 257
Index 275
1 Hans Holbein, The Ambassadors xiii
2 Marcel Duchamp, Bottlerack 10
3 Man Ray, Self-Portrait 22
4 Man Ray, La Femme 23
5 Man Ray, L’Homme 23
Illustrations 6 Man Ray, Champs délicieux

(Rayogram) 24
7 Man Ray, still from
Retour à la raison 31
8 Man Ray, Rrose Sélavy
(Marcel Duchamp) 46
9 Man Ray, Hommage à
D. A. F. de Sade 47
10 Claude Cahun, Untitled 50
11 Claude Cahun, Frontière
humaine 58
12 Claude Cahun, photomontage
from Disavowals 59
13 Brassaï, Sculptures involontaires 70
14 Lee Miller, Tanja Ramm and the
Belljar, Variant on Hommage
à D. A. F. de Sade 92
15 Lee Miller, Under the Belljar 94
16 Lee Miller, Exploding Hand 96
17 Lee Miller, Nude Bent Forward 97
18 Lee Miller, Domes of the Church
of the Virgin (al Adhra), Deir
el Soriano Monastery 101
19 Lee Miller, The Procession (Bird
Tracks in the Sand) 103
20 Lee Miller, The Cloud Factory
(Sacks of Cotton) 105
21 Lee Miller, Portrait of Space 109
22 Lee Miller, From the Top of
the Great Pyramid 113
23 Dorothea Tanning, Pelote d’épingles
pouvant servir de fétiche 120
24 Dorothea Tanning,
Children’s Games 124
25 Dorothea Tanning, Eine
Kleine Nachtmusik 126
26 Dorothea Tanning, Palaestra 128
27 Dorothea Tanning, Birthday 129
28 Dorothea Tanning, Premier péril 134
29 Dorothea Tanning,
Cinquième péril 137
30 Dorothea Tanning, Interior
with Sudden Joy 139
31 Dorothea Tanning, Canapé
en temps de pluie 145
32 Dorothea Tanning, Murmurs 147
33 Francesca Woodman, House #3 154
34 Francesca Woodman,
then at one point 157
from Space2 162
36 Francesca Woodman, Space2 166
37 Francesca Woodman, Untitled 169
38 Francesca Woodman, Space2 170
39 Francesca Woodman, On
Being an Angel 172
from Angel series 173
from Angel series 174
42 Pierre Alechinsky, Central Park 180
43 Pattern in Pierre Alechinsky’s
painting Central Park 186
44 Pierre Alechinsky, Page
d’atlas universel (III) 193
d’atlas universel (VII) 195
d’atlas universel (X) 196
47 Susan Hiller, From the
Freud Museum 202
Freud Museum 211
Freud Museum 220
Freud Museum 223
Preface
Surrealist Ghostliness began with the insight I had in 2000 that sur-
realist perception was necessarily double and that anamorphosis
functions well as a visual paradigm for this doubleness because of the
way surrealism purports to harness both our conscious and uncon-
scious minds into a kind of idealized synthesis, what André Breton,
the author of the first two “Manifestoes” of surrealism in 1924 and
1930, would call a resolution of old antinomies or a sublime point.
As a result of this insight, I wrote an exhibition catalogue essay on
surrealist love poetry called “Anamorphic Love.” There for the first
time I integrated fully an appreciation of surrealist visual art into my
more literary work, paving the way for my focus on art in Surrealist
Ghostliness. As I was finishing my book on Robert Desnos in 2002,
I realized that his tongue-twisting poetry produced in automatic
trances at the outset of the surrealist movement provided a textual
model for the double nature of surrealist perception. Anamorphosis
on a visual level and Desnos’s “Rrose Sélavy” playful punning poems
on an aural and textual level require an analogous two-step process
of comprehension, what I called a double take, involving a first look
or hearing, followed by a second, retroactive look or hearing.
My interest in anamorphosis began with the standard image we
know of the urn that, on a second look, resolves into the silhouette
of two human faces looking at one another or the duck that trans-
forms into a rabbit. I then turned to the picture-poems of Guillaume
Apollinaire, the French poet who coined the word surrealism in 1917
and who created his handwritten “calligrams” when he was a soldier
in World War I, decades before the concrete poets identified these
poems as early twentieth-century precursors to their own. Apollinaire
xi
arranged the words on the page to replicate playfully the objects he
described, such as a tie, a fountain, or a heart. First we see the picture
the letters make and read the words, and then, retroactively, through
a mental double take, we see that the two sign systems — visual and
textual — represent two versions of the same thing, two intense im-
ages, literal and metaphoric, with the dominant version standing in
for conscious reality and the secondary version hiding like a ghost
behind it, standing in for unconscious, dream reality that we know
exists but have trouble seeing simultaneously with the conscious
reality. Each version looks like the thing described but in a different
way. Neither replicates the other exactly; the two coexist, yet it is
difficult to apprehend them both at the same time.
This train of thought led me to the most famous anamorphic
painting, Hans Holbein’s sixteenth-century Ambassadors (1533; see
fig. 1), which was created to hang next to a door so that it could be
seen head on, and then once again over one’s shoulder at the instant
of leaving the room, at which point the skull lying at the ambassadors’
feet springs into focus as the ambassadors themselves fade into a
blur. This over-the-shoulder, retrospective glance functions like the
double take Apollinaire’s poems invite when we realize these two
perspectives constitute two aspects of the same reality.
Surrealist perception is anamorphic in a way similar to the mo-
ment when a viewer perceives Holbein’s Ambassadors sideways and
backward, when, for an instant, both aspects of the painting become
apparent at once. We suddenly understand that underlying the glori-
ous achievements of the magnificently dressed men in the painting
lies the mortality that awaits them — that awaits us all. On second
glance, the suppressed, primitive truth of mortality is even more real
than the overt reality most of us live by, which is actually more of a
dreamlike fantasy, for it deludes us into believing that we will live
forever, protected from the inevitable by prosperity. The repressed
truth is more real than the reality we live consciously. The distinc-
tion between these realities, like a membrane or elusive line that is
always moving away from us, just out of reach, dissolves, in such a
xii Preface
1. Hans Holbein, The Ambassadors (1533). © National Gallery, London / Art
Resource, New York.
way as to make them almost indistinguishable from each other. For

the surrealists, the sublime point resides at the instant when one
reality bleeds into another so that, for an instant, both sides of the
duality may be understood simultaneously.
I first understood this anamorphic paradigm as ghostly in 2003,
when I began to study Lee Miller’s Egyptian photographs from the
1930s, starting with her Domes of the Church of the Virgin (al Adhra),
Deir el Soriano Monastery (ca. 1936) (see fig. 18). Here I discovered
the ghost of a woman’s nude body looking down at herself, hidden
in a landscape photograph of a monastery that for centuries had
housed only men, as though the ghosts of all the monks from the
Preface xiii
past suddenly had succeeded in fulfilling a secret desire. I was sure
this was not a mistake when I thought about Miller’s wry sense of
humor, and then I began to find ghost images in her other photo-
graphs; it became clear to me that this anamorphic effect was at
once surrealist and ghostly. The ghostliness was confirmed for me by
her elegiac From the Top of the Great Pyramid (ca. 1937; see fig. 22),
shot when Miller knew she was soon to leave Egypt for Europe and
an impending war, which would provide the surrealists with new
ghosts, beyond those of friends and family from the previous war.
The photograph hints at the ghostly presence of the photographer
herself looking out at the landscape and also seems to invoke ghosts
from the distant past in dark anticipation of the upcoming war, in
which Miller would enlist as an American photographer with the
U.S. Army.
Surrealist Ghostliness begins at the outset of the surrealist move-
ment, when the young surrealists listened, entranced, to Desnos’s
hypnotic utterings that sounded oracular and prophetic, profoundly
ghostly and otherworldly, and Desnos’s friend Man Ray — the Ameri-
can who recorded the movement photographically and later worked
with Miller — began his experiments with film. I turn then to works
created in dialogue with the movement, from the 1920s through the
1990s, including Miller’s Egyptian photographs. Surrealist Ghostliness
continues the exploration of surrealism I began in my first book and
pursues the sense my book on Desnos gave me of what it might feel
like to be haunted by someone: by a ghost exhorting me to move
forward and complete a task that at times felt akin to conjuring, not
unlike the experience of all writers of critical biographies who open
themselves to a kind of willed haunting. This book, then, allows me
to see the movement as a whole in a historic sweep that allies it even
more closely to the century into which I was born, the century that
still shapes our current era. It also includes Americans such as Ray,
Miller, Dorothea Tanning, Francesca Woodman, and Susan Hiller,
who, like me, were drawn to surrealism.
My study of the artists presented here through the prism of ana-
xiv Preface
morphosis has taught me about the human condition as a constant
negotiation with our own mortality, in which our beings are divided
between dreams and everyday realities, between the psychic and
the mundanely material, the latent and the manifest — the manifest
at times holding more secrets than the oft-probed latent content
of personal experience. In the preface to my first book, Automatic
Woman (1996), I wrote about my discovery that scholarly lives often
mirror personal histories and that my own academic writing had an
autobiographical connection. On a personal level Surrealist Ghostli-
ness has helped me to explore the interrelationship between manifest
and latent realities in my own life, in my own family story — what
we tell others about our family life, what others tell us, and what we
admit only to ourselves. More broadly, with its focus on the latent
and the visible, the manifest and the ghostly, this book points to
the ways surrealism activates the mechanism by which all literature
reveals the secret at the core of the human condition — namely, that
mortality implies a life doubled by death, a finitude within which
multiple, baroque infinitudes may be imagined.
Most of all I found affirmation of a long-held belief: that we live
experiences that are defined by what we intuit as much as by what we
think, by what we feel to be the case as much as by what we believe
we know, by our nonrational impulses as much as by our rationally
informed perceptions. To perceive fully we must perceive doubly,
at once peripherally and directly, not unlike the way we look at The
Ambassadors. We need to remain open to what lies in between the
words or images in order to appreciate them. The surrealists under-
stood this, both those who worked in the movement’s mainstream
and the several artists I present here who thrived at its margins,
finding their centers elsewhere. With this book I hope to show how
this rational surrealist quest for the knowledge of what lies beyond
the rational anticipated the ways our contemporary lives, which
we live in a state of perpetual and virtual reality, have expanded to
include what we do not fully understand in this increasingly post-
postmodern, possibly even post-Enlightenment world.
Preface xv
Acknowledgments
I wish to thank those who have been generous about welcoming my

questions and theories as I approached their own work or that of
members of their family, most particularly Dorothea Tanning, Pierre
Alechinsky, Susan Hiller, and Tony and Roz Penrose. I would not
have had the courage to do this work without your support. I also
thank Val Nelson at the Jersey Archive, who gave me advice about
finding the house of Claude Cahun, Pam Johnson of the Dorothea
Tanning Foundation and Archive, and Katarina Jerinic of the Franc-
esca Woodman Studio and Archive for their helpful encouragement.
I thank Dartmouth College for supporting me throughout the
composition and completion of this book, in particular the finan-
cial support I have received from the Dean of the Faculty Office
and the Senior Faculty Fellowship I was awarded in 2003–04, at an
early critical moment. I thank my colleagues in the Department of
French and Italian, most notably Mary Jean Green, Lynn Higgins,
Roxana Verona, Graziella Parati, Virginia Swain, J. Kathleen Wine,
Ioana Chitoran, Andrea Tarnowski, and David LaGuardia, for their
sustained interest in my work, Keith Walker for his suggestions, and
the Ramon and Marguerite Guthrie Fund for help with permissions
and illustrations.
I thank Jennifer Mundy at the Tate Modern for giving me the op-
portunity to write about anamorphosis in relationship to surrealism
for the first time in 2000–2001. I thank also the graduate students
from the Department of Romance Languages at the University of
Pennsylvania, who invited me to present this topic in its early stages,
and Dalia Judovitz, Catherine Dana, and Candace Lang from the De-
partment of French at Emory University, who invited me to present a
xvii
version of the introduction as I was finishing it. I also thank Marian
Eide and Richard J. Golsan from the Departments of English, French,
and Comparative Literature at Texas a&m University and William
Cloonan and Alec Hargreaves from Florida State University’s Depart-
ment of Modern Languages and Linguistics and the Winthrop-King
Institute for their invitations to present early versions of chapters
4 and 7. I thank Mairéad Hanrahan at University College London,
Alyce Mahon at Cambridge University, and Michael Sheringham at
Oxford University for their invitations to present chapters from the
project and for the valuable feedback I received.
I thank my colleagues in the Dean of the Faculty Office at Dart-
mouth for their collegiality, humor, and support during the years I
was writing the book, most particularly Janet Terp, Chris Strenta,
Amanda Bushor, Kate Soule, Erin Bennett, Lindsay Whaley, Rob
McClung, Dave Kotz, Nancy Marion, Margaret McWilliams-Piraino,
June Solsaa, Craig Kaufman, Carissa Dowd, Sherry Finnemore, and
Kim Wind. For material support I owe a debt to the deans and as-
sociate deans of faculty, Carol Folt, Michael Mastanduno, and Le-
onore Grenoble, in particular for help with the illustrations. I thank
former associate dean and provost Barry Scherr for always believing
in my work. And I thank the lively intellectual encouragement I’ve
received at the colloquia organized at West Dean College in West
Sussex, particularly from Dawn Ades, Roger (and Agnès) Cardinal,
Alyce Mahon, Elza Adamowicz, and Sharon-Michi Kusunoki, at the
annual 20th- and 21st-century French and Francophone Studies In-
ternational colloquia, the Modernist Studies Association meetings,
and the Gradiva Seminar on Psychoanalysis and Literature.
I thank my mentor and friend Gerry Prince. I also wish to thank
friends who have questioned, advised, and encouraged me, including
Katherine Hart, Kathleen Hart, Laurie Monahan, Jonathan Eburne,
Georgiana Colvile, Dominique Carlat, Olivier Bara, Adam Jolles,
Celeste Goodridge, Benjamin Andréo, Jorge Pedraza, Gérard Gas-
arian, Van Kelly, Ronald M. Green, Donald Pease, Gayle Zachman,
Juliette Bianco, Jim Jordan, Joy Kenseth, Martine Antle, Annabel
xviii Acknowledgments
Martín, John Kopper, Riley O’Connor, Amy Allen, Mary Childers,
David Getsy, Barbara Kreiger, Brian Kennedy, Kristina Van Dyke,
Melinda O’Neal, Mary Ann Caws, Eric Santner, Wendy Pelton Hall,
Nancy Forsythe, Doreen Schweitzer, Julie Thom, and Shelby Morse.
I also thank former students who have helped to shape my thinking,
especially Jeannine Murray-Román, Nomi Stone, Susan Doheny,
Silvia Ferreira, Diana Jih, Naari Ha, Stephanie Nguyen, Monique
Seguy, and Kate Goldsborough. I thank Kathryn Mammel for send-
ing me photographs of the sites in Greece from which Susan Hiller
collected some of her objects. I thank Mostafa Heddaya, who helped
me untangle the illustrations during one invaluable summer’s work
as a James O. Freedman Presidential Fellow. I thank Hakan Tell for
etymological advice (any error is my own). And I owe a special
thanks to Maureen Ragan for her help with the bibliography during
the manuscript’s final stages.
For technical support I am indebted to the Arts and Humani-
ties Resource Center of Dartmouth College, in particular to Susan
Bibeau, Thomas Garbelotti, and Otmar Foelsche. I want to thank
the staff at the Hanover Inn and the Dartmouth pool, in particular
Barbara and Adrian at the Inn and Andy and Steve at the pool.
At the University of Nebraska Press I wish to thank my editors
Ladette Randolph and Kristen Elias Rowley, my able copyeditor
Judith Hoover, and my production editor Sara Springsteen. At Wil-
liam and Mary I thank Caroline Hasenyager for her help with the
index and all the colleagues who inspire and support me every day.
I could not have completed this book without the kind hospital-
ity of friends in France and the United Kingdom, most particularly
Claude and Hélène Garache, Marie-Claire and Maurice Dumas, and
especially Jacques Polge and his sons, Denis and Olivier, and their
families, as well as Tony and Roz Penrose.
I thank those members of my family who helped me understand
the personal dimension of my scholarly interest in ghostliness: my
mother, Jane Harris Conley, and my sister and her husband, Grace
and David Gumlock, as well as the Stamelmans, Walshes, and Sun-
Acknowledgments xix
shines, especially our granddaughters Julia, Eliza, and Sophie. This
book is dedicated to those who most helped me uncover the ghost-
liness in my own family story, which gave me the answer to the
question of why I wrote this book: my friend Marian Eide and my
husband, Richard Stamelman. I couldn’t have done it without you.
Earlier versions of parts of the introduction and chapters 1, 2, 3, 5, 6,

and 8 appeared in the following publications. I thank the publishers
for granting me permission to use this material:
“Surrealism’s Ghostly Automatic Body,” Sites: Contemporary French
and Francophone Studies 15.3 (June 2011): 297–304. Reprinted by
permission of the publisher, Taylor & Francis Ltd., www.taylorand-
francis.com.
“Les objets-corps tournants de Man Ray,” in Arts, littérature et
langage du corps III: Plaisir, souffrance et sublimation, ed. Jean-Michel
Devesa (Bordeaux: Pleine Page Editeur, 2007), 361–70.
“Claude Cahun’s Iconic Heads: From ‘The Sadistic Judith’ to Hu-
man Frontier,” Papers of Surrealism 2 (Summer 2004), http://www.
surrealismcentre.ac.uk/papersofsurrealism/journal2/index.htm.
“Modernist Primitivism in 1933: Brassaï’s Involuntary Sculptures
in Minotaure,” Modernism/Modernity 10.1 (2003): 127–40. © 2003
by the Johns Hopkins University Press. Reprinted with permission
by the Johns Hopkins University Press.
“Les révolutions de Dorothea Tanning,” Pleine Marge 36 (Decem-
ber 2004): 146–75.
“A Swimmer between Two Worlds: Francesca Woodman’s Maps
of Interior Space,” Journal of Surrealism and the Americas 2.2 (2008),
jsa.asu.edu/index.php/jsa.
“Nous habitons tous dans la maison de Freud: Susan Hiller chez
Freud à Londres,” Gradiva 1.11 (2008): 51–64.
xx Acknowledgments
Introduction
Surrealism was a haunted movement from the beginning. It began

not quite four years after the end of World War I, with the response
of André Breton to René Crevel’s story about what he did over his
summer vacation. Walking on a beach in 1922, Crevel met a medium
who invited him to a séance because she had “discerned particu-
lar mediumistic qualities” in him, resulting in what Breton called
Crevel’s ““spiritualist’ initiation” (Lost 92). Breton and his friends,
most of whom were involved with dada, then decided to practice
on themselves the mediumistic techniques Crevel had learned, hop-
ing to reveal buried secrets within themselves because of what they
knew about Freud’s theory of the unconscious, while at the same
time refusing “the spiritualist viewpoint” and the possibility of any
“communication . . . between the living and the dead” (92). In his
essay “The Mediums Enter,” a curious title given his categorical re-
jection of spiritualism, Breton identified this practice for the first
time as surrealism (in homage to Apollinaire) and described it as
“a certain psychic automatism that corresponds rather well to the
dream state” (90).1 He thus claimed the legacy of spiritualism for this
new, Freudian-inspired avant-garde movement while simultaneously
repressing and transforming it into a ghost, thus creating what I call
surrealist ghostliness.2
Spiritualism was launched in 1848 when the Fox sisters of Hydes-
ville, New York, claimed to communicate with the dead through
knocking sounds in their house. It spread quickly to Europe and
led to a rise in popularity of mediums and magnetic somnambu-
lism, otherwise known as hypnosis, which was taken seriously by
scientists such as Camille Flammarion and Pierre and Marie Curie.3
1
It had originated with the French craze for Franz Anton Mesmer’s
theory of animal magnetism during the political upheaval of the
late eighteenth century, a theory that destabilized the ascendency of
Enlightenment thinking and concurred with the rise in popularity
in England of gothic fiction by Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis.
Mesmer’s “discovery” of “a primeval ‘agent of nature,’” a “superfine
fluid that penetrated and surrounded all bodies” that he claimed
could be used to “supply Parisians with heat, light, electricity, and
magnetism,” captivated his contemporaries, as Robert Darnton
explains, because, like Newton’s gravity and Franklin’s electricity,
Mesmer’s fluid confirmed that human beings were “surrounded by
wonderful, invisible forces” (3–4, 10). Subsequently, despite Mesmer’s
abhorrence of “superstitious and occult practices of all kinds,” his
theories paved the way for both nineteenth-century spiritualism,
which also explored invisible forces, and twentieth-century theories
of psychology and psychoanalysis (Crabtree 171).4
The Gothic Imagination

Surrealism’s historical link to the late eighteenth-century’s gothic
imagination surfaces in Breton’s 1924 “Manifesto of Surrealism,” in
his high praise of Lewis’s gothic novel The Monk (1796). Breton makes
it provocatively clear that he prefers Lewis’s ghosts to Dostoyevsky’s
realism and holds up fairy tales as exemplars of literary fiction. In
paying homage to Freud in the “Manifesto” — stating that he practiced
Freud’s methods while working as a medical auxiliary during World
War I — Breton embraces the creative practice of automatism, signal-
ing surrealism’s attachment to both of Mesmer’s legacies, intentional
and unintentional: the scientific and the spiritualist, the Freudian
and the occult (Manifestoes 23). When Breton effectively recast the
Cartesian cogito “I think, therefore I am” in the second sentence of
the “Manifesto” with the suggestion “I dream, therefore I am” and
with the characterization of “Man” as “that inveterate dreamer,” he
established surrealism’s dedication to exploring all the ways in which
2 Introduction
nonrational, psychic, and paranormal phenomena may inform the
understanding of human experience (3).
Although partly motivated by the ghosts of lost friends and their
own experiences in World War I, with their appropriation of spiri-
tualist automatism the young surrealists transformed the ghosts
that practitioners of spiritualism sought to conjure into ephemeral
forces within the unconscious mind. The psychic forces they sought
to understand were like metaphorical versions of the ghosts of spiri-
tualism, which looked like bodies — particularly those captured on
film by spirit photography — but were in fact only traces of bodies,
matter left over after death yet retaining psychic awareness, an ability
to communicate, and the double knowledge of life and the afterlife,
of life before and after death. Unconstrained by mortal chronology
or rules of behavior, spiritualist ghosts are simultaneously threaten-
ing and inspiring in their freedom, symbols of rebellion against fate
and the constraints of mortality. While the surrealists rejected the
ghosts of spiritualism, they retained the subversive ghostliness of the
gothic imagination that had spawned those ghosts. Their embrace of
automatism signaled a desire to explore the fundamentally ghostly
experience of opening oneself up to whatever might be hidden within
the psyche, intentionally putting oneself into a trance state in order
to access otherwise repressed thoughts, words, and images buried
in the unconscious mind.
By 1933, however, although in keeping with his early spiritualist-
inflected titles, The Magnetic Fields (1920) and “The Mediums Enter”
(1922), Breton’s use of mediumistic art to illustrate “The Automatic
Message” contradicts his argument in the essay against spiritual-
ism’s goal of accessing outside spirits in favor of the surrealists’ goal
of accessing ghostly voices within the self. He thus once again af-
firms the link between spiritualism and surrealism in his negation
of spiritualism, eleven years after his negation of it in “The Medi-
ums Enter,” while the plentiful illustrations present spiritualism as
a significant forebear. Roger Cardinal confirms that these “images
Introduction 3
directly lifted from Spiritualist publications . . . create an impact in
their own right . . . foregrounding the complementary discussion of
visual automatism and mediumistic creativity” (“Breton” 24–25). By
1949, however, when he cofounded the Compagnie de l’Art Brut with
Jean Dubuffet, Breton finally explored openly the correspondences
between surrealist and mediumistic and spiritualist art at which he
had only hinted in 1933 (see Cardinal, Outsider). By the 1950s sur-
realism was well established, and spiritualist automatism no longer
threatened surrealism’s Freudian appropriation of it. Breton even
included admiring essays on mediumistic and spiritualist art from
the 1950s in the book version of Surrealism and Painting (1966).5 The
ghost of spiritualism could cease to be repressed and denied and
was finally allowed to coexist with the movement that had sought
to replace it.
Surrealist ghostliness as a concept names both the repressed
historical legacy of spiritualist automatism and the ghostliness of
surrealist psychic experimentation. More broadly the profoundly
ghostly aspect of all human psychic experience could be attributed
to Bretonian surrealism, according to Foucault, who, in an interview
given shortly after Breton’s death in 1966, credited Breton with having
wiped out “boundaries of provinces that were once well established.”
Foucault attributed a new “unity of our culture” in the “domains
of ethnology, art history, the history of religions, linguistics, and
psychoanalysis” to “the person and the work of André Breton. He
was both the spreader and gatherer of all this agitation in modern
experience” (Aesthetics 174).
Foucault’s use of the word agitation appropriately identifies the
unknown within the self to which Breton fiercely advocated re-
ceptive attunement. This constitutes surrealist automatism’s most
ghostly aspect and extends the injunction of Arthur Rimbaud, a
surrealist forebear, to find the other within the self and let it speak.
“I is someone else,” Rimbaud wrote in May 1871 (“Je est un autre”).
“I am present at this birth of my thought” (Complete 305). For the
surrealists, as for Freud, inner voices have the potential to shed light
4 Introduction
on the human condition, divided as it is between conscious and un-
conscious perception. In “The Automatic Message” Breton describes
the inner voices that surface during the automatic experience as
communicating a “subliminal message” that speaks in a language
“which has nothing supernatural about it,” while at the same time
insisting that that language remains “for each and every one of us
. . . the vehicle of revelation,” using religious terminology to describe
a psychological phenomenon (Break 138). The gothic, the fascina-
tion with magnetism, the rise of spiritualism, the establishment of
psychoanalysis, and the exploration in literature and art of psychic
phenomena trace a trajectory that extends from the eighteenth cen-
tury to the twentieth and joins spiritualism to surrealism.
The Psychic Geography of Surrealist Ghostliness

The psychic geography of surrealist ghostliness extends from Europe
to North America as the twentieth century progresses. I study here
eight examples of works or bodies of work by artists and writers
who explore ghostliness from mainstream surrealism to its distant
periphery, from 1923 to the 1990s. These artists and writers all used
automatic experience as a point of departure for examining the
ghostly in their work. In chapter 1 I discuss the ghostly liveliness
of inanimate objects in Man Ray’s early films Emak Bakia (1923),
L’Etoile de mer (1928), and Les Mystères du château du dé (1929). In
chapter 2 I examine how Claude Cahun questions the human in her
ambiguous self-portraits from the 1920s and specifically in Frontière
humaine (Human Frontier) from 1930, which highlights the ghostly
truth of human mortality. In chapter 3 I look at Brassaï’s and Salvador
Dalí’s irreverent examinations of the sacred in modern European
society through Dalí’s essay on Art Nouveau architecture and Brassaï’s
photographs of found objects from 1933 that, like Ray’s inanimate
objects, resonate with a ghostly inner life. Chapter 4 completes the
study of surrealist ghostliness in the 1930s with an analysis of the
empty landscapes shot by Lee Miller in which she playfully reveals
ghostly human forms.
Introduction 5
In chapter 5 I investigate Dorothea Tanning’s disturbingly ghostly
animation of domestic space in her turn from painting to sculpture
in the mid-twentieth century. Chapter 6 illuminates the surrealist
ghostliness the young American photographer Francesca Woodman
invested in her studies of the permeable parameters of time and space
characteristic of the baroque in her series of self-portraits from the
1970s. Chapter 7 finds surrealist ghostliness in Pierre Alechinsky’s
1980s paintings on nineteenth-century maps, in which he reenvi-
sions European history as a ghost within the present while blend-
ing intensely personal and political concerns. Chapter 8 concludes
this study of surrealist ghostliness with Susan Hiller’s mimicking of
Freud’s personal collection in From the Freud Museum (1991–97).
This work incorporates her feminist and postmodern experience,
haunted by the ghosts of Freud, the Holocaust, and the cold war.
Whether or not they identified themselves as surrealist, all of these
artists and writers enter into dialogue with mainstream surrealism.
They respond to Breton’s recipe for making surrealism in the “Mani-
festo” and to the implicit invitation to participate fully in what I have
called the “surrealist conversation,” as surrealists like Louis Aragon,
Robert Desnos, and Max Ernst did.6 This conversation also includes
women, who had a place at the surrealist “banquet,” as Tanning put
it, thanks to the open invitation for everyone to participate in the
“Manifesto” and later in “The Automatic Message,” where Breton
declared, “Every man and every woman deserves to be convinced
of their ability to tap into this language at will, which has nothing
supernatural about it” (Tanning, Birthday 11; Breton, Break 138). In
the nature of most collectives there was a dominant voice, that of
Breton, but there was room for other voices too: a space for dialogue
that Breton tried to guarantee in the literary art journals he edited
until his death in 1966.
Why does surrealist ghostliness become apparent now, in the
twenty-first century, like a lost photographic negative emerging out
of developing fluid? Is it tied to a global response to the turn of the
century, for example, the events of September 2001, which produced
6 Introduction
a heightened sense of vulnerability in the West, or to a desire to
believe we might overcome mortality and never lose ourselves or
our loved ones, despite the truth about mortality that we all know,
the truth unveiled in The Ambassadors (see fig. 1)? Could it be con-
nected to related cultural phenomena, such as a renewed interest in
the supernatural manifest in films like The Sixth Sense (1999), The
Blair Witch Project (1999), The Others (2001), Twilight (2008), or
Paranormal Activity (2009), television shows like Buffy the Vampire
Slayer (1997), Charmed (1998), or The Ghost Whisperer (2005), or
novels like Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987) or books by best-selling
authors such as Anne Rice, Stephenie Meyer, or J. K. Rowling, and,
more recently, art exhibitions like The Perfect Medium (2004–05),
curated by Clément Chéroux and Andreas Fischer, about the link
between photography and spiritualism?
Interest in the ghostly has also been manifest in academic cul-
ture, such as Derrida’s Spectres of Marx (1994), in which he reflects
on Marx and Shakespeare and exhorts his listeners “to learn to live
with ghosts” because “time is out of joint” (xviii, 19), or his Archive
Fever (1996), in which he shows how Freud’s theories about the
unconscious necessarily incorporate ghosts. Marina Warner, in her
encyclopedic Phantasmagoria (2006), theorizes “a new model of sub-
jectivity” linked to the virtual realities available through the Internet
(378), and Avery Gordon, in her sociological study Ghostly Matters
(1997), argues eloquently that ghostliness is a way of knowing and
being in the world. In The Unconcept (2011), Anneleen Masschelein
identifies the Freudian uncanny, the psychoanalytical corollary to
surrealist ghostliness, as “a late-twentieth-century theoretical concept”
for similar reasons (4). “In various disciplines,” she argues, “the con-
cept of the uncanny fits within a larger research program that focuses
on haunting, the spectral, ghosts, and telepathy as a material phe-
nomena in culture and society” (144). The current fascination with
the paranormal, the supernatural, and the psychic is the result of the
normalization of the phantasmatic, of acts of psychic doubling, that
occurred throughout the twentieth century, beginning with Freud; it
Introduction 7
makes visible the degree to which an avant-garde movement linked
to the arts, like surrealism, was invested in the phantasmatic.
Four Characteristics of Surrealist Ghostliness

Surrealist ghostliness may be identified by a series of four primary
characteristics, all of which will be explored in this book. The first
of these characteristics reveals a recognizable link to spiritualism:
namely, its trace as the repressed ghost of surrealism and as a ghost
that has sprung back into popular culture at the beginning of the
twenty-first century.
The second characteristic of surrealist ghostliness consists in the
rhythm of automatism as characterized by alternations between mo-
ments of suspension and moments of flow. Suspension here means
the conscious and concentrated direction of thought toward pure
receptivity; at the outset of automatic practice all conscious activ-
ity is suspended as one falls into a trance. Flow, on the other hand,
describes the rush of automatic words, images, and voices that flood
consciousness in sensual ways. Flow is another way to character-
ize the sensation Foucault evoked when he described Breton as “a
swimmer between two words [who] traverses an imaginary space
that had never been discovered before him” (Aesthetics 173).
The oscillating doubleness of the automatic rhythm of suspension
and flow also characterizes another surrealist practice that surreal-
ist ghostliness illuminates — that of the impulse to create archives.
Jonathan Eburne has argued that the surrealist desire to collect,
visible in Breton’s extensive personal collection, reflects “the sus-
pensive function of the archive” because of the way such a collection
serves as “a means for distinguishing and dislodging epistemological
certainty” and simultaneously appeals to and defies “the tendency
for knowledge to systematize itself ” (“Breton’s Wall” 21, 42). Indeed
the surrealists explicitly rejected the modes of categorization that
typify state-sanctioned archives.7 John Roberts identifies surreal-
ism’s propensity for the “counter-archive” with the surrealists’ taste
for photographs that document aspects of human existence that
8 Introduction
would rarely find their way into a municipal archive, such as Cahun’s
intimate portraits of herself in multiple disguises, which constitute
an almost archival study of alternative identities for a European
woman of her generation (106). These doubles for herself, ghostly
presences captured on film, emblematize the way all archives are
ghosts of previous times, traces of something lost, that speak to the
present and future out of the past.
In thinking about the papers, objects, and thought stored in
Freud’s house in London, Derrida ascribes a “shifting” quality to
the notion of the archive in Archive Fever that resembles the rhythm
of suspension and flow of surrealist automatism. In the case of the
archive, this rhythm is linked to the tension the desire for archiviza-
tion stimulates between the death drive — triggering a retrospective
instinct to memorialize — and the life force, which faces the future.
This oscillating “shifting figure” of a notion thus yokes together the
impulse to stop time with the impulse to rush forward and thereby
mimics the equally alternating rhythm of automatism (Derrida,
Archive 29).
The third characteristic of surrealist ghostliness involves the sen-
sual aspects of surrealist experience. Foucault evokes this charac-
teristic with his metaphor of swimming, thus describing surrealist
automatic writing as an intensely experiential “raw and naked act”
(Aesthetics 173). Although surrealism had a consistently strong visual
component, the surrealists were also attracted to the creation of
works that depended on touch, beginning with collage, which was
adopted as a technique by dada artists who later became surrealists,
such as Ernst.8 Janine Mileaf even ascribes “a form of embodied or
tactile knowing” to the surrealists’ courting of “disturbance” (Please
17).9 Touch was a key factor in the dada and surrealist fascination
with objects, beginning with Marcel Duchamp’s invention of the
readymade, a found object turned away from its original function,
such as an industrial bottle dryer used in cafés, renamed Bottlerack
(1914; see fig. 2) and displayed in a gallery. By the 1920s Ray had
begun to create assisted readymades, such as his Cadeau (Gift; 1921),
Introduction 9
2. Marcel Duchamp,
Bottlerack (1961; replica
of 1914 original). © 2011
Artists Rights Society
(ars ), New York / adagp ,
Paris / Succession Marcel
Duchamp. Philadelphia
Museum of Art: Gift of
Jacqueline, Paul, and
Peter Matisse in memory
of their mother, Alexina
Duchamp, 1998.
an iron impractically studded with nails, adding an emotional and

surrealistically psychological aspect that reflects Ray’s feelings about
work in the garment industry, which could have been his fate.
Linked to a political rejection of “high” art in favor of art that
could be made by anyone, the pursuit of art that involved touch
allied the surrealists with what Martin Jay, after Rosalind Krauss,
has identified as a “crisis of visual primacy” in France during this
period (212). Later this crisis would manifest itself in the dissident
surrealist Georges Bataille’s embrace of “base” materialism, “derived
from the bodily experience of materiality,” and in the surrealist craze
for making objects (Jay 228). Such a “haptic aesthetic” has been
identified broadly by Adam Jolles as a “tactile turn” in surrealism
tied to Tristan Tzara’s essays on African art. In 1933, in “Concerning
a Certain Automatism of Taste,” Tzara identifies the attraction to
African art as “bound to an intrauterine account of the world that
originated with tactile representation” (in Jolles 36). He links tactil-
ity to “our most powerful desires, those that are latent and eternal”
10 Introduction
because they are “prenatal,” tied to memory and “the satisfactions
offered by substances that can be touched” (“Concerning” 213, 209).
The patina on African objects that makes them “precious” stands as
“proof that the object has already answered the intrauterine desires
of a whole series of individuals,” desires that in Western culture have
been submitted to a transference to visual experience (210).
Tzara’s claim that objects we touch daily, such as buttons, eggcups,
and children’s toys, can acquire “totemic” status akin to the patina
that makes an African statue “precious” anticipates and supplements
the argument made three years later by Walter Benjamin in “The
Work of Art in the Age of Reproduction” (Tzara, “Concerning” 212).10
Tzara’s patina, which comes from generations of handling that in-
volves an erosion of the original material out of which a golden glow
emerges, parallels Benjamin’s understanding of aura as irrevocably
tied to withering, even shriveling. For Benjamin, aura is linked to
uniqueness and history; reproductions substitute what he views
favorably (because they are nonelitist) as “a plurality of copies for a
unique existence.” Mechanical reproduction “withers” “the aura of
the work of art,” which is linked “to the history which it has experi-
enced” (Benjamin, Illuminations 221). What Benjamin leaves out of
his argument is the possibility that a mechanically produced object
such as a toy (a material corollary to a mechanically reproduced
image), through the acquisition of “history” by handling (Tzara’s
patina), might be reinvested with “aura” because the desire it awakens
reactivates a ritualistic function. The reactivated “cult value” then
conforms to the occult meaning of aura as a luminous substance sur-
rounding a person or a thing, possibly blurring boundaries between
person and thing (224).
Although it was precisely this occult meaning of aura from which
Benjamin wished to distance himself, as Miriam Bratu Hansen ar-
gues, he remained ambivalent about the aura (337–38). Hansen
ascribes Benjamin’s insistence on the aura as “a phenomenon in
decline” to the political climate of the time. It expediently allowed
him to introduce a term with occult associations into Marxist debates
Introduction 11
while also seeking “to counter the bungled (capitalist-imperialist)
adaptation of technology that first exploded in World War One and
was leading to the fascist conquest of Europe” (338). She views in his
overall mode of theorizing the concept of aura dialectically as “open
to the future” despite his emphasis on the aura’s decline, on “a past
whose ghostly apparition projects into the present” (349, 341).
One of the multiple definitions of aura Hansen finds in Benjamin’s
work from the 1930s echoes the link between a person and an object
Tzara suggests through the parallelism he draws between the patina
on African objects and childhood toys (Hansen 339). “To perceive the
aura of an object we look at means to invest it with the ability to look
at us in return,” Benjamin states in “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire”
(188). For Tzara the auratic connection that blurs the boundaries
between person and thing (going back to the occultist sense of aura)
is inevitably linked to touch. We experience an object’s totemic value
when we touch it. This activation of a latent force within a manifestly
ordinary thing, an irrational yet powerful and intense desire buried
in an industrially manufactured object rendered precious by touch,
conforms to the paradigm of surrealist ghostliness as a nonrational
experience and as double: having latent and manifest aspects that
forcefully and visibly coexist.11
As well as touching, touch also manifests itself as the sense of
being touched, the experience of envelopment, of the frisson linked
to ghostliness that Foucault identified as characteristic of Bretonian
surrealism. Ernst, a pioneer in dada collage, described this feeling of
envelopment linked to touch in paintings he made in 1934. One of
these had the subtitle Effect of a Touch, suggesting the feeling at once
physical, sexual, and emotional of being touched by someone. Simi-
larly when he wrote in “Beyond Painting” (1936), “Blind swimmer, I
have made myself a seer,” he was referring to the kind of inner vision
and insight stimulated by the experience of sensual envelopment that
is more connected to touch than to any of the other senses (122).
The fourth and most dominant characteristic of surrealist ghost-
liness involves three paradigmatic mechanisms for doubling and
12 Introduction
creating ghosts within surrealism — textual, visual, and corporeal — all
of which have their origin in surrealist automatism, first explored
through automatic trances at the outset of the movement. The first
of these, textual puns, were typical of the automatic nonsense po-
ems spoken by Desnos during the surrealists’ first experiments with
“automatic sleeps” that served to launch the movement in 1922. That
fall Duchamp had been publishing tongue-twisting nonsense poems
in the proto-surrealist journal Littérature under the signature of his
punning alter ego, Rrose Sélavy (éros, c’est la vie; see fig. 8). On one
of the first nights of “automatic sleeps” conducted in Breton’s apart-
ment, Desnos was challenged by Francis Picabia to speak an Rrose
Sélavy–type poem while in a hypnotic trance. Desnos complied and
began to produce one-line tongue-twisting, punning poems in series.
He later published 150 of them in Corps et biens using Duchamp’s
pseudonym, Rrose Sélavy, as the title.
With Desnos’s “Rrose Sélavy” poems, the version on the page
and in the ear is doubled by another, often more logical ghost. The
nonsense poem “Time is an agile eagle in a temple” (“Le temps est un
aigle agile dans un temple”), for example, is doubled by a series of tru-
isms all based on rational realities: time flies (like an eagle); an eagle
is noble; nobility is admired as if it were (in) a temple; time governs
us as assuredly as a noble eagle symbol in a temple; and surrealist
time — dreamtime — is agile in the sense that it does not follow strict
chronology. Surrealist time flies the way a bird does: with swoops
and halts, soaring and gliding speedily in fits and starts; it does not
follow the intervals typical of a Western clock. The reader-listener of
this poem makes all of these associations unconsciously because of
the resemblances between the way the words look and sound — the
way they “make love” to produce meaning, as Breton wrote in an
admiring essay (time, temple, agile, eagle, temps, temple, aigle, agile;
Breton, Lost 102, translation modified).12 A nonsense poem makes
sense partly in the way the puns create ghostly doubles that intercon-
nect all the words and meanings to emphasize the ghostliness that
typified those early surrealist experiments with automatic trances
Introduction 13
because of the mysterious, at times oracular pronouncements ut-
tered by the participants. Furthermore, as Marie-Paule Berranger
argues, his puns help to “render more visible the physical existence
of words”; they show that words lead a double life (106, my transla-
tion). Desnos’s punning poems, with double meanings, manifest and
latent content, set the stage paradigmatically for the ghostly objects
that would become characteristic of the movement.
Visual doubles or puns as paradigms for surrealist ghostliness have
their origin in the exquisite corpse game, invented in 1925 initially
as a group word-play game whereby each person added a word to a
sentence without seeing any of the other words. The first sentence
produced by the game gave it its name: “The exquisite corpse will
drink the young wine!” The game quickly evolved from a verbal to
a visual format: each person added a body part from head to toe or
vice versa, without being able to see what others had drawn. These
games yielded fantastically unrealistic bodies tied together by a single,
ghostly double: the body of a real human being, or possibly even
a corpse. The body deformed by the game nonetheless makes one
think of a nondeformed body that can still be identified by the head,
the torso, the legs, the feet. As with Desnos’s “Rrose Sélavy” poems,
it is the more rationally recognizable form that serves as the “ghost”
to the surrealist nonsense pun.
The double image of the exquisite corpse, whereby we see one
thing and imagine another, may best be characterized as anamorphic.
In the same way, we almost hear another poem when we hear or read
a “Rrose Sélavy” poem, since, as Marie-Claire Dumas asserts, these
poems fold back on themselves, saying the same thing twice (310).13
Anamorphosis, from the Greek for “form,” morph, seen “backward,”
ana, or understood retrospectively, identifies a process of percep-
tion that requires a double take — a first look, followed by a second,
retrospective glance. As described in the preface, Holbein’s painting
The Ambassadors stands as the most famous visual example of ana-
morphosis.14 In L’Art Magique (1957), Breton recognized this painting
as an important precedent to surrealism because its anamorphosis
14 Introduction
offers a “double reading of the universe” to the viewer (213, my trans-
lation).15 At the feet of two magnificently dressed men standing in
front of a beautifully rendered table with objects on it representing
human achievements in knowledge, travel, and commerce lies an
indiscernible blob that comes into focus as an elongated human skull
only when looked at sideways with the lateral backward glance made
possible by the door on the painting’s right. This skull points to the
underlying reality of mortality that subtends the main image like an
unwanted ghost under any record of human achievement: despite all
accomplishment possible within a human life, each and every one
one of us will die, will become a corpse, a thing. The painting as a
whole works something like Desnos’s “Rrose Sélavy” poems and like
exquisite corpse drawings in that first we see one reality, and then we
see another. Within the phenomenon of surrealist ghostliness two
aspects of the same human experience coexist.
Surrealist anamorphosis varies a great deal, from actual anamor-
phic paintings by Dalí, in which two concurrent images overlap, to
much more subtle examples where there are only hints of a double
image embedded in the work, such as in Miller’s Egyptian landscapes.
Anamorphosis is widely prevalent in surrealist art and represents the
strongest evidence of surrealist ghostliness as a unifying phenomenon
throughout the movement. In this book I consider the anamorphic
qualities of the works I analyze, and in each case these anamorphoses
underscore the presence of surrealist ghostliness. I believe that the
anamorphic qualities of surrealist ghostliness resonate at this historic
and cultural moment because of the recent revolution in technology
linked to the normalization of the Internet and its widespread use,
which has also generated a proliferation of subjectivities in the virtual
world (e-mail, Facebook, and Twitter), and because of the layering
effect and depth that computers have given to the screen, transform-
ing it from a two-dimensional into a three-dimensional space.
The third and last paradigmatic mechanism for doubling and
revealing surrealist ghostliness involves the human body — what I
call the corporeal pun based on the literalness of Breton’s analogy
Introduction 15
between a surrealist body and a recording machine, which makes
it more of a pun than a metaphor. The surrealist interchangeability
of a body with a machine began with Breton’s contention in the
“Manifesto” that true surrealists are human beings able to transform
themselves into receptacles “of so many echoes,” into “modest record-
ing instruments,” at once inanimate and sentient, passively receptive
and insightfully able to interpret the sounds and echoes that imprint
themselves on the unconscious before emerging into consciousness
(Manifestoes 27–28). Human beings and recording instruments share
a propensity for receptivity. In the automatic trance, the surrealist
surrenders all control over mind and body in order to capture as
many voices, words, and images as possible, as they bubble up from
the unconscious. The recording machine is not only like the body;
it is the same as the body — a corporeal pun. Body and machine are
alike in their most salient feature of receptivity.
The body as machine has a deadly corollary as well: a machine
is a thing, and the body will become a thing when it dies, when it
becomes reduced to the skull hidden as a blob in Holbein’s Ambas-
sadors. This is the future that arrests our attention as though it were
an eye looking back at us, which is exactly how the psychoanalyst
Jacques Lacan, who was closely allied with the surrealists in the
early 1930s, describes the “flying form” of Holbein’s skull (Four 90).
That skull that looks back at us with the truth of our own mortality
“opens up the abyss of the search for a meaning — nothing is what it
seems to be,” explains Slavoj Žižek about Lacan’s reading of Holbein
(91). This sudden knowledge of what we repress every day — the
knowable unknowable future that levels human experience — this
confrontation with the reality of ghostliness, is captured by Breton
in his metaphor of the human being as a recording instrument.
Two other surrealists use objects to describe the body in an au-
tomatic trance, and these objects are also receptacles “of so many
echoes,” like Breton’s recording instrument. Desnos’s body-bottle
from “If You Knew” and Paul Eluard’s body-house from “The Word”
(both published in 1926) describe the automatic experience as ghostly
16 Introduction
because of the reduction of the body to a thing that looks like and
sounds like a human being in the manner of a pun and because of
the images and sensations that pass through these receptacles. In
“If You Knew,” Desnos imagines his body as “the night bottle of the
poet” transformed into a baroque space of contained infinity capable
of capturing a falling star. Then, in a suspended moment of separa-
tion from the immediacy of the experience, he detaches himself,
corks the bottle that is himself, and watches from the outside “the
star enclosed within the glass, the constellations that come to life
against the sides” (Essential 157, translation modified). In Eluard’s
“The Word,” the sensation of space takes place outside of the body,
which in this poem is represented as a house with windows for eyes
that shut slowly at the moment of sunset, as a shadow falls across
the façade. The “word” comes from outside and “slides” over the
roof, animating the house. Although it “no longer know[s] who’s
in charge,” in a manner typical of the trance, the word slipping into
the body-house can “nakedly love” like a living being and express
pride: “I am old but here I’m beautiful” (Capital 23). In each case a
poetic trance allows the poet to discover previously unknown voices
buried within.
All of these body-objects, whereby an inanimate thing stands in
as a metaphor or corporeal pun for a human being who has mo-
mentarily suspended all willed conscious activity for the sake of the
revelations the flow of automatic practice brings, have their corollary
in the 1930s with the development of the surrealist object out of the
dada readymade. The surrealists imbued objects found or made with
a psychoanalytic function, leading the person who finds or makes
them to striking insights. “The found object seems to me suddenly to
balance two levels of every different reflection,” explains Breton, “like
those sudden atmospheric condensations which make conductors
out of regions that were not before, producing flashes of lightning”
(Mad 33). The found object can “enlarge the universe, causing it to
relinquish some of its opacity” since we live in a “forest of symbols”
that can provoke “sudden fear” (15).
Introduction 17
Breton uses the words latencies and forces to compare objects to
human bodies, suggesting a sentient, animate quality to fundamen-
tally inanimate things. He did this in 1936, three years after Freud’s
essay “The Uncanny” was published in French translation for the
first time. In “The Uncanny” Freud identifies in psychoanalytic terms
the constellation of phenomena I call surrealist ghostliness; these
are uncanny or ghostly experiences like that of mistaking a doll for
a living human being. The attribution of psychological latencies to
objects was codified by Breton in “Crisis of the Object,” where he
identifies the latent forces found in the surrealist object (“Crise”
24).16 These forces, while made up of psychological feelings, from
desire to anger, are impenetrable because they arise from the clash-
ing conjunction of conflicting realities, from the utilitarian function
of Duchamp’s Bottlerack, for instance, with its modernist elegance,
which paradoxically makes sense of this practical tool’s place in an
art gallery. This clash operates according to the paradigm Breton
established in the “Manifesto” for the surrealist image as a collision
of “distant realities.” This “juxtaposition of two more or less distant
realities” generates energy and forces, which Breton compares to an
electric spark generative of shock, a “luminous phenomenon,” akin
to an instant of insight or revelation (Manifestoes 20, 37).17
Having been found, collected, turned away from its original func-
tion, and displayed by a surrealist, the object represses its “manifest
life”; its transformation generates a veritable force field (champs de
force), whereby what was formerly manifest becomes latent, revealing
ghostly energies inherent in the object’s former manifest life.18 In a
short article Breton published about the 1936 surrealist exhibition of
objects, he describes objects as capable of releasing surplus “poetic
energy . . . found almost everywhere in a latent state.”19 Using lan-
guage reminiscent of surrealism’s spiritualist origins, Breton suggests
that objects provide access to psychological revelation through the
release of this “latent energy,” a release that creates what I call ghost-
liness. Objects of the sort explored in this book have the ability to
inform humans about themselves as if they were thoughtful sentient
18 Introduction
beings, in other words, just as surrealist human beings still them-
selves, like objects, in order to attune themselves more thoroughly
to the world around them. This is because Bretonian “subjective
reality,” as Michael Sheringham explains, “is not hidden deep inside
us so much as scattered around the perceptual world, where we can
piece it together from our sensory reactions” (71).20 These points of
reference outside of ourselves, such as objects, help us to make sense
of what emerges in a ghostly way out of the unconscious through
attuned receptivity.
The prism of ghostliness allows a retrospective look at surrealism

that continues all the way back to late eighteenth-century challenges
to Cartesian rationalism, a period that the art historian T. J. Clark
locates at the beginning of modernism.21 I argue in Surrealist Ghostli-
ness that the ghostliness that haunted automatism historically, ex-
perientially, and poetically remained imprinted on the movement’s
works throughout its history. Ghostliness as a keystone idea unifies
a movement with disparate artistic practices; it concentrates on the
common thread the ghostly legacy of automatism weaves through
the movement’s thought and works: its punning texts and anamor-
phic images, its vision of the human body as uncannily like and
not like the thing it will become in death, its tacit way of accepting
mortality. Through surrealist ghostliness, surrealism insisted that
we know more than we think we know, more than we can see in
front of us, and that human beings are capable of a wisdom that is
at least as intuitive, emotional, and instinctive as it is rational. This
book shows how the surrealists, and those who were in dialogue with
them, explored that wisdom in a way that was ultimately hopeful,
thus creating a solid basis for further exploration of psychic realities
in the twenty-first century.
Introduction 19
1 The Cinematic Whirl of
Man Ray’s Ghostly Objects
They were furious, they thought I was a bad electrician.

Man Ray
Man Ray made, photographed, and filmed objects he imbued with

intimacy by subliminally telegraphing the extent to which they had
acquired human qualities transferred to them by human touch, thus
making them ghostly. He challenged the assumption that inanimate
things cannot have an inner life, a ghostly interiority produced in
concert with the history of their use and their association with human
touch. In this way, Ray’s objects are like children’s toys, objects of
personal worth imbued with interior lives. His version of surrealist
ghostliness springs from the sentient animism of his objects that
raise questions about the mysterious latencies within ourselves that
desired objects activate. In his images he reveals a private world, as
though he has secret information about the private lives of inanimate
objects, their double identities as manifestly inert yet latently lively.
Like the surrealist image with its juxtaposition of two more or less
distant realities, Ray’s transformations of objects involve an “opera-
tion [that] is double,” explains Brigitte Hermann. “The object must
21
3. Man Ray, Self-Portrait
(1916). © 2011 Man Ray
Trust / Artists Rights
Society (ars), New York /
adagp, Paris.
be tampered with, modified” (9).1 By exposing the double life of

objects, which in turn asserts their inherently poetic function, he
unveils their ghostliness. Hermann cites a 1969 interview Ray gave
to Pierre Bourgeade: “I never said the objects were readymades.
Duchamp found it revolutionary to put a phrase or his name on an
object found at the hardware store. No — for me, there must be not
one thing but two. Two things, which by themselves had no relation
with each other” (9).
Ray first used objects in his Self-Portrait from 1916 (see fig. 3),
for which he substituted doorbells for eyes and a textured hand-
print for the torso. The body represented as a hand underscores
the importance of holding and touching objects. Arturo Schwarz,
commenting on the work’s first public showing, writes, “Below the
hand is a doorbell push-button. Visitors were naturally tempted to
press the button, and expected the doorbells to ring — but nothing
22 Man Ray’s Ghostly Objects

4. Man Ray, La Femme
(1920). © 2011 Man Ray
adagp, Paris. cnac /
mnam / Dist. Réunion des
Musées Nationaux / Art
Resource, New York.
5. Man Ray, L’Homme

(1920). © 2011 Man Ray
adagp, Paris.
happened. ‘They were furious, they thought I was a bad electrician,’
Man Ray told me with a twinkle” (136). As an object that stands in
for “Man,” Ray’s Self-Portrait anticipates Breton’s corporeal pun at
the root of surrealist ghostliness, whereby a body substitutes for a
thing and a thing may take the place of a living body.
Ghostly doubleness also haunts Ray’s openly autobiographical
photographic works, such as the object Man (1918), which he re-
named La Femme in his 1920 photograph (see fig. 4), an eggbeater
shot in bright light so that its shadow becomes its double, and the
object titled Woman (1918), which he renamed L’Homme in another
1920 photograph (see fig. 5). Woman/L’Homme, made up of two
“hemispherical reflectors and six laundry pins pinching a sheet of
glass,” at first calls to mind a woman’s breasts at the expense of her
head, but when retitled (as L’Homme), it reflects the eyes of a man
perched on a skinny torso (Schwarz 158).
Like Duchamp as Rrose Sélavy (see fig. 8), the female alter ego
later borrowed by Desnos, Ray also explores alternately gendered
6. Man Ray, Champs

délicieux (Rayogram)
(1922). © 2011 Man Ray
Society (ars ), New York /
adagp , Paris. cnac /
mnam / Dist. Réunion
des Musées Nationaux /
Art Resource, New York.

identities within himself. He thus responds to the initial charge
of surrealist automatism: to seek and uncover all the realities and
identities coexisting, buried, in the human psyche. These new iden-
tities work like puns or jokes and reflect tangibly what Freud was
revealing psychically at the same time: that identity is far from the
stable entity suggested by Enlightenment thinking. These objects
and puns hint at the ghostly complexity of human psychic identity
that fascinated the surrealists, whereby every individual lives a life
haunted by flashes, memories, and ghosts from other times and
places that are often experienced sensually as much as intellectually,
through the rushing sensations Foucault called the “raw and naked
act” of automatism.
Ray was not the first photographer to create photograms, images
made by putting objects directly onto developing paper and exposing
them to a flash of light without the intermediary of a camera, but his
renditions of this technique are probably the best known. Through
their method of manufacture they highlight the extent to which each
rayograph, named after himself, has been handled by him, as have
the objects whose materiality is expressed by the photograph.2 His
evocation of the tactility of the objects he photographed underscores
their thingness and consequently enhances how we perceive them,
thus teasing out what Susan Pearce has called “one of their most
powerful characteristics”: their inwardness, “ambiguous and elusive
though it may be. Objects hang before the eyes of the imagination,
continuously re-presenting ourselves to ourselves, and telling the
stories of our lives in ways which would be impossible otherwise”
(47). They are linked to the self, which comes back to Ray’s first
photographed objects, Man (La Femme) and Woman (L’Homme),
which were also in a way portraits of himself.
In April 1922, almost a year after his arrival in Paris and mere
months before Crevel’s encounter with the medium, Ray wrote to his
American patron Ferdinand Howald, “In my new work I feel I have
reached the climax of the things I have been searching [for] the last
ten years — I have never worked as I did this winter, I have freed my-
Man Ray’s Ghostly Objects 25

self from the sticky medium of paint, and am working directly with
light itself ” (in Foresta 28). If photographs are intrinsically ghostly
because of the way they tangibly show past moments in the present,
photograms or rayographs are particularly so, being more directly
presentations than representations.3 With rayographs, the touch of
the object on the paper is direct and immediate, yielding images of
objects that are palpable in their graininess. They feel textured, like
the handprint on his multimedia Self-Portrait. They represent tactility
in action, the bringing to life of photography’s inherent sensuality.
They show one of the attributes of surrealist ghostliness I listed in the
introduction: how touching is a form of “tactile knowing,” as Mileaf
argues in Please Touch (17). With Ray, this sensuality has two ghostly
dimensions: the ghost of the actual object itself, conveyed vividly by
the rayographic method, and the ghostly tactility of the individual
who selected and handled the object since, despite the seemingly
random aspect of some of the objects he rayographed, each thing
chosen also conforms to Ray’s specific taste. Thus they retain some
of the aura of the person who produced them. Hermann explains
that Ray himself made the things that were necessary to him; he
dyed his own curtains with tea and made his own furniture, first in
his house in New Jersey and later for his Paris studios (9). Similarly
his photographed objects became prized possessions.
His rayographs show how everyday objects (such as combs, pipes,
funnels, keys, bottles, necklaces) are transformed by their handling
and presentation into precious things. Their uniqueness is confirmed
in “When Things Dream,” the meditative essay Tzara wrote about
Ray’s images, which he called “projections surprised in transparence,
by the light of tenderness, of things that dream and talk in their
sleep” (84). Tzara confirms the apparent sentience of Ray’s objects,
their ghostliness. The darkness of the rayographs envelops them in
a velvety aura of secrecy and indistinctness, which we experience
when we strain to identify what it is Ray has put on the paper. His
magnified attention to ordinary objects humanizes them and renders
them at once intimately recognizable and mysteriously opaque.

This humanization that also involves transforming ordinary things
into quasi-magical objects invested with psychic power turns on
their having been handled. In this way the “aura” that Benjamin, in
“The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” states
mechanical reproductions have lost gets restored to the surrealist
object by virtue of its double valence as simultaneously something
inert and something lively, paradoxically inanimate and somehow
sentient, even fascinating due to the way it reflects back to the owner
aspects of his or her own desires, lost or forgotten aspects of his or
her own self. Benjamin had anticipated this sentient aspect of things
in “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” when he wrote about aura as
an experience in human relationships and also in “the relationship
between the inanimate or natural object and man,” which involves
investing in the object “the ability to look at us in return” (188). Ray’s
photograms comparably materialize objects with all the strangeness
of dreams — invested with the kinds of idiosyncratic desires and fears
that dreams alternately hide and reveal. They make visible the desire
linked to touch that Tzara ascribes to African objects and personal
objects like children’s toys, which have a “totemic” value linked to
handling (“Concerning” 210). And although they feature the access
to “simultaneous collective experience” that the surrealists admire
and Benjamin praises about photography and film, which involves,
in his view, a “shriveling of the aura,” the intense intimacy of the
rayograph arguably exceeds the “exhibition value” Benjamin argues
has replaced the “cult value” linked to aura and restores some of the
magic of the supposedly lost auratic function (234, 231, 225). Ray’s
images render ordinary objects even more unsettling and ghostly
once they are activated by being set in motion on film.
From Still to Moving Pictures

Ray made four films in the 1920s, spanning his shift in emphasis from
dada to surrealism: Retour à la raison (1923), Emak Bakia (1926),
L’étoile de mer (1928), and Les mystères du chateau du dé (1929). Re-
cent work on surrealist film has acknowledged that although his first

two films were criticized by some surrealists for being too dada, all
of his films resonate with cinematic characteristics admired by the
surrealists, such as illogical editing paired paradoxically with a focus
on narrative and character (see Fotiade, “Slit Eye” 110–11; Short 29).
These contradictory attributes share what Ramona Fotiade calls a
common vocabulary linked to the objects that feature prominently in
Ray’s films: the cinema’s ability to fill the field of vision with magnifi-
cations of ordinary things that cast them in a new light, lending them
the appearance of sentience and consequently a profoundly uncanny
quality (115). As early as 1918 Louis Aragon identified the cinema’s
ability to transform objects in fantastic ways, “to the point where
they take on menacing or enigmatic meanings” (“Décor” 51–52).
Ten years later Artaud similarly highlighted film’s uncanny ability
to animate the inanimate: “Due to the fact that it isolates objects, it
endows them with a second life, one that tends to become ever more
independent and to detach itself from the habitual meaning these
objects have. Foliage, a bottle, a hand, etc., live a quasi-animal life
which asks only to be utilized” (“Sorcery” 103). Both Aragon and
Artaud were discovering cinema’s ability to bring to light the visual
representations of the ghostliness that fascinated the surrealists.
This combination of odd magnifications and focalizations that
distort the illusion of everyday reality in surrealist film, together
with a semblance of narrative cohesiveness, keeps these films lively
and forces the viewer to question where reality resides. The objects
in Ray’s four films, which ought to serve as reliable referents of
familiar everydayness, lie at the center of the surrealist ambiguities
his films highlight because of the ways these objects epitomize sur-
realist ghostliness through their odd sentient qualities despite their
evident inanimate reality. They are animated by the filmic process
in a way that teases out what Breton would later ascribe to objects:
the ability to prompt the universe “to relinquish some of its opacity”
through the revelation of the latencies hidden within objects that
serve as metaphors for the unconscious forces buried within human
consciousness (Mad 15).

Objects play as central a role in Ray’s films as the human beings
in them (such as his friends Alice Prin, known as Kiki of Mont-
parnasse, and Robert Desnos). Like other surrealists, Ray found
that objects were capable of casting a spell on him as a collector in
the manner described by Benjamin. As the collector handles his
objects, writes Benjamin in “Unpacking My Library,” “he seems to
be seeing through them into their distant past as though inspired”
(Illuminations 61). Surrealist objects, like Benjamin’s books, had a
conjuring power that facilitated their collectors’ journeys into their
own psyches. Each object also transports the viewer in some fash-
ion; it is invested with psychic powers tantamount to the religious
powers the surrealists, as Western collectors, attributed to objects
from Africa and the Pacific Islands. The surrealists transposed the
powers associated with so-called fetish objects to the more mundane
objects they found in local flea markets, which could nonetheless,
like fetish objects, “summon a complete world of dreams and pos-
sibilities — passionate, rhythmic, concrete, mystical, unchained,” as
James Clifford argues (137).4 In his films Ray brings these powers to
life through movement and the ghostly blur he creates by making
these objects turn as though he had managed to capture them when
they did not realize it and was able to show how they seem to have
chosen to begin to dance.
Retour à la raison
Objects dominate Ray’s film Retour à la raison, put together over-
night for Tzara’s Coeur à barbe (Bearded Heart) dada spectacle in
July 1923, after Tzara had prematurely advertised a Ray film that had
not yet had been created. At the same time, the presence of Ray’s
lover Kiki infuses those objects with an uncanny lively quality, just
as the objects highlight the extent to which her body, shown in parts,
has mechanical properties; she and the objects appear somewhat
interchangeable in the film’s visual world. As the objects twirl in the
film, the blur of their movement lends them an almost sentient air.
When Kiki’s torso similarly twirls at the end, her presence has two

functions: her mechanical turning mirrors the nonsentient qualities
in the objects, while at the same time her human, living flesh casts
vitality onto the objects with a reciprocal, anamorphic effect. In her
stiff turns we remember the turning of the objects, just as the whirl-
ing objects come to contain within their turns the ghostly residual
blur of a human being’s pirouette.
Ray’s well-known description of how he concocted his first film
explains its odd combination of moving rayographs spliced together
with bits of actual footage: “On some [film] strips I sprinkled salt
and pepper, like a cook preparing a roast, on other strips I threw
pins and thumbtacks at random; then turned on the white light for
a second or two, as I had done for my still Rayographs. . . . I simply
glued the strips together, adding the few shots first made with my
camera to prolong the projection. The whole would not last more
than about three minutes” (Self 212). The film footage includes his
glass-and-wood object Dancer/Danger, which he had brought from
New York: a mechanical “dancer,” according to the word visible on
the object, that is made dangerous by the double take provoked
by the smudged letter c in Dancer that transforms it into the g in
Danger. The footage also features Ray’s rolled paper Lampshade,
several twirling egg-carton dividers, spinning spirals that look like
collars, and, finally, Kiki’s “light-striped torso.” These objects, as well
as her torso, turn one way and another, like the rhythmic swaying of
a dancer’s body that turns and returns, as the film’s title, Return to
Reason, suggests. The film employs reversals of footage that go back
and forth between recognizable moving images of Kiki’s torso and
negative print versions of her turning body. Ray also compares the
movement of pins and thumbtack to that of dancers: “huge white
pins crisscrossing and revolving in an epileptic dance” while “a lone
thumbtack” makes “desperate efforts to leave the screen” (212).
Ray’s objects dance across the screen as though they were sen-
tient. The object Dancer/Danger, for example, is filmed with smoke
undulating in front of it in a visual imitation of human breath.
Georges Didi-Huberman specifically compares Ray’s use of smoke

7. Man Ray, still from Retour à la raison (1923). © 2011 Man Ray
Trust / Artists Rights Society (ars), New York / adagp, Paris.
and montage to the chronophotography of Etienne-Jules Marey from

a generation earlier, attributing to both Ray and Marey a “common
apprehension of the world” through mechanical experimentation,
since both were concerned with what makes a still image appear
alive (312).5 This effect of making inanimate things appear alive is
further consolidated by the way Kiki’s torso is framed. Her evidently
live body can also be seen to invest the previous spinning objects
with ghostly humanity.
Kiki’s visible torso is doubled by the nude impressions of her body
stretched out on the film yet invisible to the eye when the film is pro-
jected; these still photographs of her nude body were “photographic
negatives pressed onto film,” as Patrick de Haas explains (111, my
translation). They were buried in the filmed sequences, rendering
them almost invisible as the images flash by on the screen: “Contrary
to the previously presented images (of the spring, the tacks, the pins),
these [images of Kiki] stretch out over several photograms, without
having a repetitive structure. Whereas the cinema, in order to give
an appearance of continuity, records an image discontinuously and

projects it that way, Man Ray makes a continuous impression which
will subsequently be separated by the projector. Nothing can then
be apprehended of the original image by the naked eye” (111, my
translation).
At first this nude (with a face) looks like a fragment of a photo-
gram within the cinematic flow. This latent still image is brought
to life through cinematic motion. As the fragments of Kiki’s nude
body flash by after the images of the tacks and pins, the viewer
registers a retinal trace recognition of a human body mixed in with
the inanimate objects made lively by smoke and turning movement.
The segment that introduces Kiki further reveals a blurry eggbeater,
reminiscent of the object Man that led to the photograph La Femme.
As the body flashes by, the viewer receives a subliminal hint that a
human being is about to appear; this is an example of the “convulsive
identity” of ambiguous bodies in surrealist cinema in general that,
according to Elza Adamowicz, “constitute . . . a revision of identity
as fixed and immutable” (“Bodies” 28–29).6 This real yet ghostly
body, which remains invisible within the film’s virtual world, lends
life to Ray’s spinning tacks and pins.
Unlike rayographs, which capture objects directly through their
contact with the developing paper, this film hides its most precious
object and allows it to haunt the rest. We can see this body in slow
motion only by viewing the segment in reverse, in a mechanical
simulation of rethinking or returning, in a sentient version of the
turning and returning objects in the film. As a result, Ray’s tacks
dance deliriously; their bodies and latencies whisper of hidden ener-
gies. They corporealize the abstract description Breton gives in the
“Manifesto” for how inner “forces” rise to the surface of the mind
through intentional automatic practice (Manifestoes 10). Breton offers
a water metaphor for consciousness as constituted by “depths” and
“surface”: “If the depths of our mind contain within it strange forces
capable of augmenting those on the surface, or of waging a victorious
battle against them, there is every reason to seize them — first to seize
them, then, if need be, to submit them to the control of our reason”

(10). Here Ray lends a real yet hidden body to those abstract forces
in the depths of our minds and identifies those forces with desire,
showing that what lies buried in his psyche are images of his nude
lover, which he just barely brings to the “surface” of consciousness
by just barely bringing those images into focus in his film. He mate-
rializes the surrealist aim to show how conscious and unconscious
perceptions work in concert, bringing to life a new, modernist ver-
sion of spirit photography wherein the “spirit” is very real and yet
is more apprehended or nonvisually experienced than it is actually
seen through an enactment of the anamorphic backward or sideways
glance. His filmic ghost is a live woman; the film’s ghostliness derives
from the energy she generates from her latent position within the
film.
Emak Bakia
The animation of objects in Ray’s second film, Emak Bakia, further
develops aspects of the latencies of surrealist objects, again partly
through their juxtaposition with real women. The roughly twenty-
minute film revolves around two loose narratives: a trip to the sea-
shore and an awakening from sleep. Each narrative moves according
to rhythms of stillness and movement, which recall the ebb and flow
of the tide or the breath as it moves while the body lies still, as well
as the back-and-forth turns and returns of Retour à la raison and
the distinctive rhythm of suspension and flow of automatism.7 One
rhythm represents a move away from the viewer; it is expressed in
images of a car stopped and then driving away from the seashore
and of the camera itself being flung into the air and tumbling down.
Another rhythm represents a turning back toward the viewer: a
movement represented by a series of women seen in close-up who
are then shown slowly opening their eyes and looking directly into
the camera.8 One of the women is Kiki. The other women function
predominantly to underscore Kiki’s living human presence; at the
same time, their appearance in a series underscores their parallel
function to the objects in the film, which are also presented in series.

Intermittently objects revolve, beginning with the pins and tacks
reprised from Retour à la raison.
The opening scene, revealing Ray as the cameraman, humanizes
the camera and photographic process. A human eye is superimposed
over a lens, continuing Ray’s highlighting of the ambiguous liveli-
ness of things by blending an active human body part, the eye, with
a mechanical lens that similarly focuses on what surrounds it and
thus serves a similar function. Like Retour à la raison, Emak Bakia
features ghostly figures; a delirious series of women’s legs stepping
off a car’s running board in elegant succession eventually gives way
to fish and their ghosts swimming in and out of the ocean current.9
This switch from land to sea images highlights the seaside setting of
the film, which, through the juxtaposition of the sea and land and
the indeterminate in-between border that separates the two, refers
to surrealism’s juxtaposition of opposite realities such as sleep and
waking, night and day. The spinning sequences emphasize the non-
visual aspects of experience inherent in surrealism and in surrealist
ghostliness through the tactile frisson such a sequence can evoke, not
to mention the evocation of the purely tactile, nonvisual experience
of swimming that Foucault attributed to Breton as the inventor of
surrealist automatism when he called Breton a “swimmer between
two words.” The spinning sequences in this second film by Ray cause
Didi-Huberman to claim that in “Emak Bakia, in 1926, the Mareysian
dance is still present. . . . Collision becomes dance” (310–11).
The film’s first set of three objects, all made by Ray, fall into the
category later identified by Breton as “interpreted found objects”
(“Crise” 24). The first of these objects, Fisherman’s Idol, mimics the
sorts of statues from Oceania and Africa surrealists collected to-
gether with their own found and made objects.10 It was fabricated
from “some pieces of cork washed up by the sea” near the country
villa belonging to Arthur and Rose Wheeler, also named Emak Ba-
kia, where certain sequences were shot (Schwarz 155).11 The second
object, the neck of a cello, is shown with a group of wooden blocks
and then alone with dice.12

The third object, a work subsequently named Homme d’affaires
(1926),13 represents a schematic jumping man who is coupled with a
scientific chart of the arc of his jump in a way that specifically calls to
mind Marey’s and Eadweard Muybridge’s attempts to bring objects
to life through the illusion of motion made possible by chronopho-
tography. Ray’s use of this object in his film reverses the history of
motion picture technology by evoking early experiments in which
photographers tried to capture motion using repeating images in
sequences. This evocation of early photographic experiments lead-
ing to cinematic animation underscores the way Ray here makes
his objects look alive by according them histories and thus equal
status with the human beings in his films. It also creates what Didi-
Huberman calls la traîne visuelle — a visual lag akin to the blurred
retinal trace left lingering after the nude stills of Kiki’s body flash by
in Retour à la raison. This retinal trace or traîne visuelle activates “still
vibrating remnants of previous passages: virtualities become visual-
ity over the entire surface” of the image because of its “orientation
towards future movement” (Didi-Huberman 243).
A second set of three objects, also animated by movement, comes
closer to the surrealist objects of the 1930s with the more personal
linkage of these objects to human beings. The first, a spinning crystal
cube with blunted corners, has a more clearly personal value than
the previous objects because it is visually linked to Ray’s experiments
with light. A crystal also implies visionary perception; it is linked to
insight, to the power to see into the psyche as well as into the future,
a gift of second sight that fascinated the surrealists, a fascination they
inherited from their spiritualist forebears. For a couple of seconds
this crystal appears to change shape according Didi-Huberman’s
idea of the residual retinal trace, a direct manifestation of surreal-
ist ghostliness. Certainly the whirling of Ray’s objects prefigures a
continuation of their turns; their future movements and transforma-
tions, in the shape of ghostly afterimages, create a kind of afterlife
for them. When Jacques Rigaut appears toward the film’s end and
rips up shirt collars before ripping off his own collar, he adds a new

and penultimate object to the film’s parade of objets: a host of collars
that begin to dance. Rigaut’s handling of these collars imbues them
with personality and history; it invokes their latencies, for they are
ghosts of the men whose necks they adorned, including the man
Ray called “the dandy of the Dadas,” Rigaut himself (Self 221).14
The last object in the film turns out to be Kiki once again. With
eyes painted onto her closed eyelids, she looks at first glance like a
mannequin. But when the camera awakens her and she begins to
move, she opens her eyes and smiles, and we recognize her. The final
image that follows is a ghostly double-exposure of Kiki closing and
opening her eyes, as if switching back and forth from doll to woman.
She is more animated here than her torso was in Retour à la raison.
The other smiling women, whose faces, like the objects earlier, are
seen in sequence, become visual supports for Kiki, and Kiki in turn
lends life to all the objects in the film; her knowing smile suggests a
mannequin coming to life, demonstrating, in a ghostly manner, how
objects not only have latencies and otherness linked to their past
lives, but they can also know something about us.15 The anamorphic
transpositions Ray explored with his Man and Woman objects and
Retour à la raison carry surrealist ghostliness in the pointed confu-
sion between animate and inanimate objects.
L’Etoile de mer
Ray’s most lyrical and surrealist film, L’Etoile de mer, made in 1928
from a spoken poem by Desnos, concentrates more on human be-
ings than on objects and has a recognizable plot: boy meets girl, boy
acquires a starfish and contemplates fate, boy loses girl but finds
consolation in the personified starfish who remains beautiful to him.
It is surrealist in its plot, optical illusions, and theme of love. Several
objects may be seen in this film of less than seventeen minutes, most
emblematically the starfish in a jar that was Desnos’s personal pos-
session. Only one scene has the spinning objects recognizable from
the earlier films. Ray displays them against a dark background as if
they were treasures from a personal collection. A montage features

two starfish in jars, two roulette wheels, a spinning mirror, the crystal
cube from Emak Bakia topped by a smaller cube, two glass domes
encasing what looks like coral,16 and some glass figures moving up
and down and turning. Above the starfish a pair of hands sheathe
and unsheathe a saber in a rhythmic motion that mimics the twist-
ing and turning of the other objects. Minutes later the protagonist
looks first at the starfish and then at the palms of his hands, where
he sees his fate lines traced in black ink.
The flashing mirror reflects back to the viewer a sense of self-
consciousness, like the women’s opening eyes in Emak Bakia, and
anticipates Breton’s suggestion in Surrealism and Painting of the
need to adopt an internal model that should not come from nature
but should emerge entirely from the imagination (4). The screen
is a “mirror turned threshold,” as Wendy Everett reminds us, and
“through this threshold . . . inner and outer realities collide” (151).
This turning mirror points to the possible presence of the specta-
tor within the film. This intimation of humanness is suggested as
well by the turning crystal that evokes the touch of the hands that
collected it and the dice that a gambler’s hand will throw onto the
roulette wheels. While the spinning may refer self-consciously to the
film’s production — to the film turning in the camera as it records
images and then again later as it projects them — it also refers to the
way past time may be captured by film that nonetheless maintains
its forward momentum. Like the message placed in a bottle, like
the porthole-style window opening at the beginning and closing
at the end of the film, like the gelatin smeared on the camera lens
reminding the viewer that she or he is seeing through glass into the
magical dream world within the bottle of the film, these spinning
objects speak at once of the time of their creation and of an aware-
ness of future fatality.17
The inexorability and randomness of time are also evoked by the
saber: will a roll of the dice bring luck and love, or will it provoke a
duel and death? This scene reprises the questions about present plea-
sure and the threat of future mortality, depending on one’s point of

view, presented in Holbein’s Ambassadors, just as the switching per-
spectives among objects seen dead or alive, sentient or nonsentient,
emulate the anamorphic coexistence of different realities on which
the surrealist image and Holbein’s sixteenth-century painting turn.
Because they are signs of personal destiny, the whirling objects
in L’Etoile de mer anticipate surrealist objects from the 1930s. The
film’s montage suggests that objects induce humans to meditate on
fated love; the objects appear to have psychic powers, and yet they
are the sorts of “almost ordinary” objects Breton will praise three
years later in his essay “L’Objet fantôme” (1931): namely, objects with
“the surprising power of suggestion” (22, my translation).18 They
work as memento mori in the manner of photographs, for, as Ray
describes in “The Age of Light” (1933), they capture the “residue of
an experience” that inspires a moment of insight with the recogni-
tion that this experience triggered by the photograph has a personal
connection, an identification “with a similar personal experience”
(21).19 This combination of a present insight with a past experience
paradigmatically parallels the clarifying insights linked to chance
that come like “flashes of light that would make you see, really see,”
as Breton wrote in Nadja (19).
Les Mystères du château du dé

Ray made Les Mystères du château du dé (The Mysteries of the Chateau
of the Dice) at the behest of the Viscount Charles de Noailles, who
wanted to show “the installations and art collections in his château”
(Self 226). The film was “a purely personal affair to be shown later to
his guests as a souvenir, and not released to the public” (226). Once
again the film features interchangeable human beings and objects in a
continuation of the surrealist exploration of the corporeal pun. What
does it mean to come to the ghostly realization that human beings
will become objects when they die, not to mention the realization
that human beings sometimes have as much choice in their fate as
objects do? What does it mean that objects can give the uncanny
illusion of having thoughts and feelings, the way humans do?

Ray also dedicated this twenty-five-minute film to the theme
of chance and cites the title of Mallarmé’s poem “A Throw of the
Dice Never Will Abolish Chance” in an opening intertitle. A man-
nequin’s hand holds and throws dice at the beginning and the end;
balls tossed are left to bounce, as if they had a will of their own. The
film’s predominant figures are people masked to look like man-
nequins, creating an often unintentionally humorous effect. These
mannequin-people play games with outsized dice and the bouncing
balls; they assume gymnastic poses and run and jump alongside a
swimming pool into which they dive. They stop periodically as well
in their striped gymnastic outfits, which accentuate their doll-like
qualities; they alternate between object-like stillness and animated
movement in a new, humanized enactment of automatism’s legacy
of suspension and flow.
Mannequins were first evoked in the “Manifesto” as exemplary
of the marvelous (Manifestoes 16). They were visible in Giorgio de
Chirico’s paintings and Eugène Atget’s photographs, in particular his
1912 shot of mannequins wearing corsets in a shop window that the
surrealists admired and reproduced in their journal, La Révolution
surréaliste. In 1938 mannequins became the beckoning sirens of the
International Exhibition of Surrealism in Paris, which featured a
surrealist “street” of mannequins, each one of which was designed
by a different artist, including Ray.20 Les Mystères du château du
dé anticipates this fascination with doll-like humans by nine years
and underscores the ghostly latencies in surrealist objects, for the
mannequin-people confuse and deepen the distinction between
live and dead beings. In the film the last masked people to arrive
on the scene shed their coats and slowly begin to dance. Ray then
immobilizes them beside a statue, turning the image from positive
to negative and making it difficult to distinguish the human couple
from the statue. At the film’s conclusion, human identity is once again
left ambiguous; the visual lag or traîne visuelle of past movement
persistently animates this couple’s stillness.

Objects Collected among Friends
That in his films from the 1920s Ray would so skillfully anticipate the
major preoccupation of surrealism in the 1930s comes as no surprise
when one considers the rayographs, with their tactile presentation
of objects. For the surrealists, objects aroused strong emotions and
invited an intimate relationship, as most of Breton’s writings about
objects suggest. Benjamin’s comment about his book collection ap-
plies also to the objects collected in surrealist studios: ownership
“is the most intimate relationship that one can have to objects. Not
that they come alive in [the collector]; it is he who lives in them”
(67). For Breton, objects have a clarifying, psychoanalytic function;
they behave like analysts in their ability to communicate psychic
secrets to those drawn to them. Sculpture too can sometimes fulfill
a psychic-affective function, as Michel Leiris writes in 1929 about
Alberto Giacometti’s work, which exemplifies for him “true fetish-
ism, which is to say love — truly [being] in love — with ourselves,
projected from the inside out” and situated within a “precise thing”
(“Alberto” 209, my translation).
Ray’s filmed objects draw out the ways that objects can seem alive,
the ways they simulate and stimulate desire. The tack in Retour à la
raison is filmed as though, in its “desperate efforts,” as Ray puts it,
it had a desire to spin out of the range of the camera. Kiki in Emak
Bakia, with eyelids painted to look like a mannequin’s eyes, moves
uncannily back and forth in the viewer’s mind between a human
woman and a doll — the former capable of returning the viewer’s gaze,
the latter not. It is the starfish in L’Etoile de mer that wins the narra-
tor’s heart, because unlike the woman — again played by Kiki — the
starfish will not leave him. This message is clearly relayed by the
film’s handwritten intertitles, which alternate between the message
that the woman, because she has abandoned the narrator, has lost
her beauty (qu’elle était belle; how beautiful she was) and the message
that the starfish remains beautiful because it (she in French) does
not (or cannot) leave the narrator (qu’elle est belle; how beautiful it/

she is). Finally, the multiple human mannequins in Les Mystères du
château du dé clearly alternate between living and nonliving things.
Ray’s objects could almost analyze the humans with whom they come
in contact because they resemble them. They rise above the level of
simple punning jokes, for they come to represent the complexity that
oscillates between the reality and the illusion inherent in anamor-
phosis, where we see one thing and then another, retrospectively,
where the resemblance of two realities forces us to question our be-
ing and humanity. It is this ghostliness that distinguishes Ray’s films
as surrealist. Though they were made at a moment when dada was
only just beginning to turn into surrealism, it is in their ghostliness
that they move away from the humorous nihilism of dada.
It is useful to remember that the earliest objects evoked by Breton
were virtual. In “Introduction to the Discourse on the Paucity of Re-
ality” (1924) Breton proposed the creation and circulation of objects
seen first only in dreams. In “L’Objet fantôme” (1931) he reproduced
a collective drawing that incorporates both visual and textual puns.
The drawing shows a sealed letter in the shape of a soup cup with a
handle, an anse, as it is called in French, on one side. On the other
side, fringed eyelashes replace the handle, thus creating a fanciful cils-
anse, an eyelash handle, which, in French, works as a homonym for
silence.21 The sealed letter does not speak, yet its silence — animated
by its humanoid eyelashes and the hands that wrote and sealed it,
as well as the ghost of what it might communicate, and activated by
its deployment of visual and poetic puns — links its past creation to
a possible, virtual future.
Projection onto a screen reasserts the object’s virtual origins, its
anamorphic double link to reality and illusion, its ability to reveal and
hide simultaneously, like the visibly dancing tacks and the invisible
nude in Retour à la raison. An object is to its cinematic projection
as it is to its latencies: both emphasize its ghostly emanations. Like
spirit photography in the mid-nineteenth century, film can make
the invisible apparent if not completely visible. We may not fully
see Kiki’s nude body in Retour à la raison, but its subliminal flash

infuses everything with a vibrant, secret life. An object with latencies
embodies the notion of dissociated sensibility typical of surrealist
film because it both invites and rejects empathy through its envelope
of mystery and confusion.
Breton emphasized the importance of collaborative effort in sur-
realism by finding objects with the intangible aid of a companion’s
sympathetic presence, as when, in Mad Love, he records the fruitful
amble with Giacometti through the Paris flea market they shared in
1934 (25–38).22 The presence of the other allowed each man to find
more readily an object for which he had been searching: a wooden
spoon for Breton and a World War I gas mask for Giacometti. This
helped to solve a problem each one had been working on. These
objects were linked to their friendship; the wooden spoon Breton
found substituted for the ashtray he had been asking Giacometti to
confect for him. “These two discoveries that Giacometti and I made
together respond not just to some desire on the part of one of us,
but rather to a desire of one of us with which the other, because of
particular circumstances, is associated. . . . I would be tempted to
say that the two people walking near each other constitute a single
influencing body, primed” (32–33). Ray’s Dancer/Danger was collected
by Breton and kept on the windowsill of his studio. It bore witness
to Breton’s activities in the same manner that Picasso’s African art,
hanging in his studio, acted “more [as] witnesses than models” (in
Rubin 260, notes 64–65). But what about an object in film?
I believe the virtual objects in Ray’s films can function like material
surrealist objects because even if the audience cannot touch, handle,
or smell them, they come close to us through Ray’s magnification
and manipulation. We see these objects through him, the way we
see objects in house museums through the eyes of the collector. We
are invited to interact personally with Ray and with these objects in
the way Breton and Giacometti realized each other’s latent desires
in Mad Love. This is how Ray “objectively” offers these cinematic
objects to us, as the Romanian surrealist Ghérasim Luca wanted his
“objectively” offered object to circulate within a small community of

friends and, by enhancing “chance in its dynamic and dramatic form,”
become a force within the community (11, my translation). For Luca
the nonsentimental offering of an object, “objectively” given (that is,
not as a traditional gift) from one friend, one hand, to another, stirs
up even more mystery within the object and makes it a more potent
instigator of dreams; the object that is found in order to be given,
an object that is destined for another (unlike the object found for
oneself), can “begin to murmur . . . a magical, black language, very
close to dreaming and to a fundamental language,” like a “secret and
mysterious communication” (23).
One can imagine the limited audience of Ray’s films as a com-
munity of like-minded people for whom this display of his personal
things comes as an offering, a literally private showing. Furthermore
the ways in which Ray’s objects were already intentionally multi-
valent, “not one thing but two,” as he explained in 1969, enhanced
their interconnectivity with other objects and their effects on other
members of his community (in Hermann 9). In this way they point
to another aspect of the rhythm of suspension and flow character-
istic of the legacy of surrealist automatism and its manifestations of
ghostliness. A thing bought or found enters a surrealist collection
as a still object, but once it interacts with other objects through jux-
taposition in its new context, it becomes part of the flow of creative
collaboration typical of surrealism.
The objects in Ray’s films crystallize an aspect of his poetic vision
that encompassed a fascination with the movement of scintillating
light captured by the camera in a kind of dance of almost sentient
things. The traîne visuelle, the retinal residue that remains after the
blurred whirl of his spinning objects, encapsulates his fixation on
their hidden liveliness that he makes ghostly visible and enhances
the viewer’s sense of their past and future movement, which sug-
gests that they will continue turning once the camera turns away.
Their ghostliness comes not only from Ray’s intensified vision but,
as Everett suggests, from what we contribute to our viewing of them:
namely, the knowledge that Ray found or made them, touched and

photographed them, and set them in motion. What fascinated Breton
about objects comes through in their whirling through the threshold
of Ray’s films: the ability of objects to tell us something unknown
about ourselves. The viewer becomes part of the small community
within which objects circulate; there is a sense of privilege at being
allowed to glimpse these things, at the chance to enter the shared
community of dreams that served to define surrealism and to be part
of the dynamic of chance, put into play within the films. As the next
chapter will show, Ray revealed even more intensely his commitment
to a community with a disturbing photograph, Hommage à D. A.
F. de Sade, which he published in 1931, and the idea for which he
very likely borrowed from his fellow surrealist photographer Claude
Cahun.

2 Claude Cahun’s Exploration of
the Autobiographical Human
Les signes ont-ils un sexe? Mon multiple est humain.

[Do signs have a sex? My multiple is human.]
Claude Cahun, “Confidences au miroir,” Ecrits
Claude Cahun, born Lucy Schwob, questioned the Enlightenment

version of the human being in her autobiographical self-represen-
tations, a personal archive that blurs the boundaries, categories,
and norms of established sexualities and ages.1 Like most archives
this intimate photographic archive of the body carries ghosts of
the past into the present and future and proposes multiple possible
versions of a life lived. When we look at her photographs, collages,
and self-portraits, we wonder whether we are seeing a woman or a
man, a young or an old person, someone who is healthy or sick, a
human being or an object. Her work studies the effects of masking
and disguise that, like Ray’s portraits of Duchamp as Rrose Sélavy in
1920–21, make no attempt to pass clearly as one identity or another
but incorporate both identities into one and conform to the double-
ness inherent in surrealist ghostliness (see fig. 8).2
Cahun’s multiple photographic identities, not all of them human
or even alive, intentionally destabilize rational assumptions and
conventions, thereby fundamentally questioning how and what we
know as human beings. Her small, intimate visual archive of the
human body, in the tradition of Atget’s or Brassaï’s photographic
45
8. Man Ray, Rrose Sélavy
(Marcel Duchamp) (ca.
1920–21). © 2011 Man
Ray Trust / Artists Rights
adagp, Paris. Philadelphia
Museum of Art / Art
Resource, New York.
archives of off-beat Paris, illustrates the surrealist propensity for the

“counter-archive” that John Roberts has identified (111). For the most
part documentary, characterized by stillness and intensity, her work
represents what Ian Walker calls “a Surrealist photography which
. . . exploits its very ‘straightness,’ its apparent realism, to Surrealist
ends” (3). Her personal archive also conforms to Derrida’s Freudian
reading of the archive as “a shifting figure” that oscillates between
the pleasure principle — the life force — and the death drive, yielding
what he calls “archive fever” (Archive 29).
Desire for the archive stems from a desire to forestall death, to
suspend time and preserve a record of its passage. It parallels the
desire to believe in ghosts, who also embody defiance of the finality
of death, rebellion against the imperative of chronological time, and
attachment to the material trace as proof of the endurance of a life
fully lived. In Derrida’s Freudian reading of the archive, the very no-
tion of the archive is subversive to itself; archive and counter-archive
are one and the same. “The archive always works, and a priori, against
46 Claude Cahun’s Exploration

itself,” writes Derrida (Archive 12). It has the doubleness inherent in
ghostliness and shows how Cahun’s insistent awareness of mortality
in her record of her possible lives connects specifically to surrealist
ghostliness.
Heads at the Edge of Reason

Cahun’s self-portraits, often produced with Marcel Moore (born
Suzanne Malherbe), disrupt the norms of conventional portraiture.3
Her ghostliest explorations of portraiture and the human condition
concentrate on the theme of the bell jar, an object constructed to
preserve material traces of the past, like a photograph or an archive.
Before turning to this series of photographs of her own apparently
severed head in a bell jar shot in 1925, however, I will examine a simi-
lar image by Ray, Hommage à D. A. F. de Sade, because, although Ray
shot his image five years after Cahun, his photograph was published
over sixty years before hers, in the surrealist journal Breton launched
in 1930, Le Surréalisme au service de la revolution (see fig. 9).4
9. Man Ray, Hommage à

D. A. F. de Sade (1930). © 2011
Man Ray Trust / Artists Rights
Society (ars ), New York /
adagp , Paris.
Claude Cahun’s Exploration 47

Ray and Cahun shared a mutual friendship with Robert Desnos
and lived within walking distance of each other, on either side of
the Boulevard Montparnasse in Paris. As part of the same surrealist
community, which was founded on the principle of collaborative
practice, it is likely that Ray had seen Cahun’s work.5 In any case,
he clearly shot his bell jar images of Tanja Ramm, the friend of his
companion and fellow photographer Lee Miller, on the same day
that Miller did. (I discuss Miller’s version in chapter 4.) Looking at
versions of the severed head in a bell jar by all three of these pho-
tographers makes it possible to distill the ways Cahun’s and Miller’s
are gendered in a manner different from Ray’s and the way Cahun
specifically enacts a form of surrealist ghostliness with the distant
realities she puts into play, beyond the nuance of gender.
In Ray’s photograph, Ramm’s head is propped on a book, tilted
backward, mouth slack, eyes shut and partially banded by a black
ribbon. A shadow crosses her face diagonally. It is difficult to tell
whether her face expresses pain, death, or ecstasy. The seemingly
detached head is in an airless globe, as though strangely preserved
from environmental decay. The bell jar photograph seems a fitting
tribute to Sade, the man to whom this issue of Le Surréalisme au
service de la révolution is dedicated, for it is a representation by a
surrealist man of a woman apparently in the throes of a limit expe-
rience, jouissance at the very edge of reason. This image fits neatly
into Ray’s repertoire of photographs of women, which include the
well-known shots of a woman’s headless torso striated by light and
shadow from the 1923 film Retour à la raison, where the torso was
Kiki’s, and again in 1930, where the torso was Miller’s.6
Ray’s photograph of an immobilized female head brings the viewer
into close proximity with death, which is suggested partly by the
closed eyes, the angle of the head, and the shadow falling across
and masking the face. He catches life’s mystery in this image, which
calls attention to photography’s own tendency to remind the viewer
subliminally of his or her own mortality, of the passage of time. In
his study of Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida, Richard Stamelman

suggests that whatever the photographic image “represents, it morti-
fies” (Lost 266). This is particularly true of Ray’s shot of Ramm’s head
taken on what looks like a kitchen table whose drawer pull resembles
the handle on a coffin. The image invites the viewer to imagine the
process of death by decapitation: the sharp and sudden suspension
of life followed by the slow flow of blood in an eerily dramatic and
exaggerated imitation of the automatic process whereby conscious-
ness, momentarily suspended, is followed by the uncontrollable
flow of words and images. These two processes unite subliminally
in this image in the intentional confusion between a human being
and an object — like Breton’s recording instrument, Desnos’s bottle,
or Eluard’s house, all examples of something alive and not alive,
along with the blurred distinction between who or what is or is not
sentient.
With her choice of angelic to characterize Ray’s bell jar photograph,
Jacqueline Chénieux-Gendron attributes ghostliness to it. An angel,
like a ghost, lives in an alternate realm, an alternate reality, as a being
who once was human but has escaped the constraints of mortality:
“angelic, this head of a woman placed under a globe like the ones
used to store bridal headdresses” (“Sade” 104, my translation). While
Ray’s Hommage to Sade may indeed refer to the risk the Marquis ran
of losing his own head, it also signals the erotic tortures endured
by many of his fictional heroines. “What fascinated the surrealists,”
argues Chénieux-Gendron, “was a certain energy bubbling around
the French Revolution particularly in its most extreme moments,”
including the daily presence of torture and death during the Terror
(98). The surrealists sympathized with the “anti-religious struggles”
typical of the revolutionary period as well as with “the widespread
questioning of moral value,” by Sade among others (98).
Indeed the theme of the headless man, which harks back to the
eighteenth century, “was ‘in the air’” by the 1930s, according to the
dissident surrealist Michel Leiris (Journal 721, my translation). In
addition to Ray’s Hommage and Cahun’s and Miller’s bell jar photo-
graphs, Desnos published a collection of poems in 1934 with the title

10. Claude Cahun,
Untitled (1925). Jersey
Heritage Collections.
Les Sans Cou (the “neckless” or “headless” ones, in punning homage

to the French Revolution’s Sans Culottes), and in 1936 Georges Ba-
taille and André Masson launched the journal Acéphale (The Head-
less Man). This nostalgic trend, which Cahun’s bell jar photographs
anticipated, was linked to a desire for renewed revolutionary fervor
in light of an expanding concern about the rise of fascism across
Europe and also to a wish to rethink what makes us human — our
intellect or our instincts. In Cahun’s photographs both these issues
are explored in images of her own severed head. Additionally, with
the visible marking of a female body, issues of gender come to the
fore, disassociating the question of the human from a uniquely mas-
culine paradigm.
Cahun’s bell jar photographs, like her self-portraits, were “angelic”
in a manner distinctly different from Chénieux-Gendron’s charac-
terization of Ray’s Hommage. Far from looking dead, the majority of
these heads appear disturbingly alive.7 Where they are angelic is in
their sexual ambiguity: “un genre indéterminé” (an indeterminate

type), as Cahun states simply in one of the multiple references to
angels in the autobiographical book she published in 1930, Disavow-
als (Ecrits 335; Disavowals 127). What strikes the viewer first and
foremost about these images is that the head is more emphatically
human than feminine and more emphatically living than dead. And
yet what human being could survive decapitation while retaining
the appearance of a thinking individual? What new sort of person
might this be? Of all Cahun’s bell jar photographs, one is dramatically
confrontational (see fig. 10). Seen “head-on” it is more alive than
Ramm’s head in Ray’s version. Of course, this liveliness is reinforced
by the fact that the eyes are open and that the viewer knows this is a
self-portrait, that it is staged and that Cahun as a head must therefore
be thinking and strategizing this very image as it is being taken.
Cahun’s head in a bell jar appears thoroughly mindful of her situa-
tion. She looks to the contemporary viewer as though she were ready
to depart in search of other worlds. Like an astronaut in a space suit
or a diver at the bottom of the sea, her image mixes confinement
and escape.8 The suggestion is not of death, as in Ray’s Hommage,
but of a kind of renewed energy and intellectual keenness. This
liveliness provokes the viewer to consider the head’s situation in the
glass globe: Why is it there? How can it breathe? How can it think?
Could decapitation be experienced with the degree of self-awareness
reflected in Cahun’s thoughtful gaze? The enhanced ambiguity linked
to gender in the photographs by Cahun, and later Miller, makes these
works even more haunting than Ray’s since that ambiguity provokes
the viewer into seeing the humanity of these heads over and above
their gender.
Cahun’s open eyes, fully conscious and aware, underscore the
incongruity of the head’s situation in an airless space, a ghostly im-
age in which consciousness and death coincide. This photograph
arouses a sense of empathy; it invites us to imagine the consciousness
of our own death with a sympathetic degree of self-awareness: “the
dead other alive in me,” which Derrida identifies with the nature of
photography. “Ghosts,” he asserts in his memorial essay on Barthes,

are “the concept of the other in the same, the punctum [its piercing
detail] in the studium [its commonplace element], the dead other
alive in me. This concept of the photograph photographs all concep-
tual oppositions, it traces a relationship of haunting which perhaps
is constitutive of all logics” (“The Deaths” 267).9
Even in the shots where Cahun’s head looks into space or medita-
tively away from the camera lens, the thoughtfulness of the face and
its disturbing awareness make of these bell jar photographs examples
of the Freudian uncanny, for, as Hélène Cixous declares, “There is
nothing more notorious and uncanny to our thought than mortality”
(“Fiction” 542). Cixous’s observation goes a step farther than Freud’s
own statement in “The Uncanny” that “everything is uncanny that
ought to have remained hidden and secret, and yet comes to life”
(130). We live from day to day while mostly repressing the knowledge
of our certain death. Cahun’s bell jar photographs sharply remind us
of this repressed knowledge, the way Holbein’s Ambassadors does.
They even enact death: the thinking head (the artist’s mind) must
be dead, must mysteriously have already been there, in order to be
present in these images (Derrida, “The Deaths” 281).
Spiritualism’s Photographic Ghost

Though working squarely in the surrealist tradition, Cahun’s work
captures ghosts in its own vocabulary while it harks back to nine-
teenth-century photographic experiments with capturing psychic
phenomena known as “spirit photography” that was typical of spiri-
tualism. By creating the impression that she is allowing the viewer
to glimpse the normally unseen, a supplement to objective, rational
reality, Cahun makes clear visual reference to the repressed ghost of
spiritualism within surrealism. “Spiritualism returned photography
to its origins in occult science,” explains John Harvey, because “pho-
tography had grown out of the union of science and the supernatural
in alchemy” when fifteenth-century alchemists “discovered how to
merge silver and marine salts to transmute off-white to black when
exposed to light” (26).

Aesthetically melancholic spirit photography was launched in
the United States by William Howard Mumler in the 1860s and sup-
ported spiritualist claims by purporting to capture real ghosts and
paranormal phenomena (see Chéroux and Fischer). The surrealists
may have disclaimed spiritualism, but photographers like Ray, Cahun,
Brassaï, Miller, and later Francesca Woodman embraced spiritual-
ism’s photographic legacy. In the hands of surrealists, photography
also sought to reveal phenomena of psychic interest aesthetically,
pioneering new ways of knowing through an art form linked to the
indexical and therefore ghostly aspects of touch — to a photograph’s
“physical connection” to what it represents (Peirce 159). However,
whereas much spirit photography was intended to be reassuring,
suggesting life after death for the beloved departed, Cahun’s photo-
graphs, while also defying the fundamental truth of mortality, do
so in an intentionally less reassuring way.
While all of the bell jar photographs — by Ray, Cahun, and Mil-
ler — are ghostly in their reminders of mortality and thus evocative of
spirit photography, they are also self-referentially about photography.
For one thing, the glass of the bell jar separating the head from the
viewer symbolizes and concretizes the glass lens through which the
photographer sees the head. The viewer is thus put in the place of
the photographer and becomes conscious of seeing a head through
glass. Both viewer and photographer are reminded of the very pro-
cess of photography and the way it freezes the moment, the way it
“mortifies” and rigidifies what the camera snaps. The click of the
shutter and the flash of the bulb might also be heard as metaphoric
equivalents to the sound made by the sudden shattering of glass — the
glass these photographs emphasize — a sound that then, through the
association with glass shards, metaphorically transmogrifies into a
palpable sensation of sharpness, one capable of severing heads with
the ensuing abrupt shudder (shutter) of decapitation. The instant of
the photograph is cut off and liberated from all surrounding, contex-
tualizing moments. It is isolated, like these heads, and also preserved
like them (in photo albums instead of glass globes). For these heads

are not just decapitated; they are displayed in bell jars, which were
often used to conserve objects, from wedding headdresses, which
Chénieux-Gendron mentions, to cheeses and cakes. This quality of
preservation is also typical of photography; we archive photographs
as mementoes of past moments to be looked at again and again,
placing them in a kind of bell jar called an album, in which past life
is preserved in a state that looks as fresh as the moment when the
photograph was taken.
By so explicitly thematizing photography’s inherent allusion to
mortality, all of the bell jar images comment on photography’s un-
canny nature — a sense of the unfamiliar haunting the familiar — and
emphasize the anamorphic nature of ghostliness wherein two realities
coexist to awaken the viewer, in a vivid present moment of viewing,
to the underlying reality of human mortality. It is the ambiguity of
the heads — impossibly dead and alive — in these photographs that
allows them to bring out photography’s own distinctive doubleness
in a way that reveals the structure of surrealist ghostliness.
Judith, Holofernes, and Autobiography:

The Head and the Human
Cahun’s self-portraits in the bell jar, as well as her early self-portrait
as the Medusa (1915), corroborate and confirm that human experi-
ence is defined partly through the confrontation with death made
visible in the rigidifying potential of the photograph. In the same
year that Cahun shot her own “decapitated” head in a bell jar, she
meditated on another famous decapitation, that of Holofernes in
the biblical story of Judith. Judith serves as one of her heroines in
a series of short stories published in 1925 in Le Mercure de France
and Le Journal littéraire. These texts are imagined monologues by
famous women, from Eve, Helen, and Sappho to Penelope, Salomé,
and Judith, in the tradition of Ovid’s “Heroides.” Unlike Ovid, how-
ever, Cahun avoids reinforcing the myths attached to these iconic
women; she also rejects the tragic passivity that characterizes so
many of them in Ovid’s treatment.10 Her stories desacralize these

heroines in an effort to humanize them, on the one hand, and to
suggest that humanity is not heroic, on the other.11 She contests their
status, indirectly showing awareness of her own contested status as a
woman artist in a male-dominated avant-garde movement.12 Cahun’s
distorted retelling of these mythic stories makes the reader realize
that myth has made these women two-dimensional. What if, she
asks, they could be declassified as icons of virtue, beauty, nobility,
patience, tragic genius, or whimsy and seen anew as human, which
is an open-ended category, as her self-portrait Frontière humaine
(henceforth Human Frontier) will make clear five years later.
In the biblical story, the brave Jewish widow Judith, on the pre-
tense of seducing Holofernes, has the audacity to enter his tent, even
though he is a commander of Nebuchadnezzar’s army and an enemy
of the Jewish town he has besieged. She then decapitates him, thus
liberating her town from annihilation.13 Cahun’s distortion of the
story undermines Judith’s renowned chastity. She presents Judith not
as a hero but as an involuntary serial killer who, since childhood,
has been in love with Holofernes and hates herself for giving in to
her compulsion to kill him. For all of Judith’s pleasure, Holofernes’s
head is unappealing: he is an ugly man with a “receding hairline,”
“dead eyes,” a “bestial mouth,” and “reptilian folds” about his neck
(“Heroines” 52). Yet by making the relationship between Holofernes
and his killer ambiguous, Cahun’s version of the Judith story lies at
the “cutting edge” of what it means to be human. As such, it comes
close to Mieke Bal’s reading of the biblical version of the story, which
challenges “our assumptions . . . about what it is and how it is that
we can know,” since no one can know what actually went on in Ho-
lofernes’s tent (263).14 Did she seduce him as a “patriot prostitute,”
as Leiris calls her, or did she not (Manhood 93)?
The assumptions about Judith that spring from the myth haunt
our knowledge of her like a ghostly aura projected onto the histori-
cal person. Cahun suggests that the unknown forces that provoked
Judith might have been foreign to our standard assumptions about
her. For Judith is as idealized as Salomé is vilified for demanding

another, more problematic decapitation, that of John the Baptist.15
Yet does the experience of severing a head, of causing a person to
pass out of life into another state of being, not constitute a limit
experience for the executioner as well as for the victim, bringing
them both face to face with mortality?
The image of a severed head serves as a point of departure for
Leiris’s textual self-presentation in Manhood, his surrealist autobi-
ography from 1939, where Judith also appears.16 It is not Leiris’s own
head that prompts his confessions, as was the case with Cahun’s visual
and textual self-portraits, but that of Holofernes. Leiris identifies
with Holofernes’s severed head and admits to an abject attraction
to Judith: “Like Holofernes with his head cut off, I imagine myself
sprawling at the feet of this idol” (95). Leiris’s motivating fear has
been interpreted by Denis Hollier not as “a masochistic weirdness
exclusive to a neurotic bourgeois male named Michel Leiris” but
as “an exemplary power that inaugurates and structures the self-
representative exercise as such. A castrating mimesis: the mirror cuts.
I recognize myself in a mirror that reduces me to a head” (Absent
109).
The uneasy recognition of the self that is the head in the mirror
inspires the autobiographical impulse, suggests Hollier, and motivates
the thinking head “to undertake the mission of rejoining his body”
through the binding process of autobiographical narrative (Absent
112). For Cahun, as we will see, this autobiographical process of
binding was more evident in her self-portrait Human Frontier than
in Disavowals. The focus on the human condition in the face of
mortality so evident in the bell jar photographs, which clearly made
visible the process and structure of surrealist ghostliness, becomes
complicated in the Human Frontier by the added ambiguity of gen-
der. That ambiguity makes this photograph her most profoundly
archival creation, in the Derridean sense of the archive as a figure
that represents a moment in which opposing realities clash as though
in a struggle to stop and capture time in the manner of a ghost.

On the Human Frontier
Beginning with the title, Cahun’s self-portrait from 1930, Human
Frontier, also questions what it means to be human (see fig. 11).17 The
only self-portrait published in her lifetime, it deflects the viewer’s
gaze in a manner uncharacteristic of her unpublished self-portraits,
in which she usually looks directly into the camera lens. It shows
her upper body from just above her waist with a black cloth draped
across her chest. Her head has been distorted by the camera so that
the skull is elongated and its curves exaggerated — an exaggeration
underscored by her shaved head, which puts into question her sexual
identity. The effect is unsettling because the photograph looks real-
istic and yet clearly it is not.18 Flattened by a draped black cloth, the
chest, as Laurie Monahan suggests, highlights the three-dimensional
roundness of the shaved head.19 The fact that the image resembles a
stylistic model of a sculptural bust gives it the three-dimensionality
of sculpture.20 Indeed its curves and shadows endow the image with
texture; the bust extends beyond the flatness of the lower body, sug-
gesting another ghostly dimension.21 The inclination of the head, the
slight fuzz of the shaved hair, and the figure’s patent vulnerability, all
invite empathy through palpability: not only is this head touching,
but she (or he or it) seems eminently touchable.22
Another way to see this figure’s vulnerability is in the elongated
skull’s distorted quality, which brings to mind the distorted skull
figuring mortality in Holbein’s Ambassadors.23 Barthes claims that
we are always aware of mortality, at least subliminally, whenever
we look at a photograph of a human being who is always within
the photograph, already part of the past (Camera 97). The frontier
of the human for Cahun is thus at the limit of touchability, at the
edge of mortality, and, once again, at the edge of reason, since direct
confrontation with one’s death involves such heightened emotion
that reason oscillates into the nonrational. This image is a quintes-
sentially surrealist work, poised as it is between one reality (our
recognition of the inevitability of death) and another (an emotional,

11. Claude Cahun, Frontière
humaine, from Bifur, no. 5
(1930).
mind-numbing response to this recognition). The head, to use Gayle

Zachman’s analysis of Cahun’s oeuvre, may be categorized as gro-
tesque because of its hybrid form, for one element seems always to
be about to transform itself into something else (398). The image is
haunted in life by death, by other worlds, a vulnerability heightened
by the head’s egg-like fragility, its eerie resemblance to the head of a
baby as well as the head of an old person.24 To today’s viewers it also
recalls the cancer survivor or concentration camp victim, anticipat-
ing possible versions of Cahun’s own future.25
The head’s hauntedness and touchability are also characteristic
of photography as a medium: the photograph documents techno-
logically what the head can see, interpret, and know. As Walker
states in City Gorged with Dreams, “The Surrealists’ own use of both
photography and the images made by photographers influenced by
Surrealism were manifestations of a desire to exploit the camera’s
ability to simultaneously render the surface of the world palpable

and render it marvellous — to reveal it as an hallucination that is
also a fact that is also an hallucination” (23). As a work that is both
realist and manipulated, a fact and a hallucination, Cahun’s Human
Frontier magnifies photography’s inherent anamorphic doubleness,
its essential ghostliness. It does this by implicating and citing Cahun’s
other work, especially the photomontages she made for Disavowals,
which come to haunt Human Frontier. Various unpublished yet now
familiar self-portraits were pasted together to make some of these
photomontages, which draw attention away from Cahun’s singularly
arresting face. In these photomontages she often appears disguised, as
Dawn Ades has indicated, by ironic visual references to “the socially
imposed shells of feminine or masculine identities” (“Male-Female”
194). Cahun herself refers to these “faces” as disposable “masks.”26
The last and best known photomontage in the book features a tower
of self-portraits on a single neck rising from the lower left-hand
corner around which curves the line “Under this mask another. I
12. Claude Cahun,

photomontage from
Disavowals (1930).

will never finish lifting up all of these faces” (Disavowals 183; see
fig. 12).27 In contrast to this collage, Human Frontier suggests an
ambiguity that is generated not by multiple images but by a single
figure, paradoxically “masked” by its nakedness, under which the
ghosts of other, alternate identities are nonetheless present.
The emphasis on the head in Human Frontier would seem to
masculinize it, insofar as head, thought, and gaze are attributes of
power stereotypically more masculine and Cartesian than femi-
nine. Yet this head’s tactile quality opposes any Cartesian tendency
toward sublimation; its corporeality tends to feminize it, just as the
bare upper body revealing fragile shoulders paradoxically suggests
a woman’s body disappearing into the flat darkness below. The bust
seems to float in the center of the image, as though unattached to a
human body, at the “frontier” between humanity and sculptural rep-
resentation. Although distorted and partial, the body is at the same
time intact, as Stamelman affirms about Cahun’s work overall: “The
woman is never . . . made the object of male desire, never reduced
to one representative easy-to-appropriate sign” (“Convulsive” n.p.).
Masculine and feminine traits overlap in a manner typical of
Cahun’s unpublished self-portraits. All dressing for Cahun was per-
formative, a masquerade, including the undressing involved in shav-
ing one’s head and the cross-dressing involved in joining femininity
with masculinity.28 Fifteen years later, in “Confidences au miroir,”
Cahun declared, “Do signs have a sex? My multiple is human. A
hermaphroditic sign would not express it” (Ecrits 586, my transla-
tion). In Disavowals she asks, “Masculine? feminine? it depends on
the situation. Neuter is the only gender that always suits me. If it
existed in our language, no one would be able to see my thought’s
vacillations” (151–52). She enacts this resistance to categorization
in Disavowals’s collage-like narrative and in a multitude of textual
masks, through which the narrator alternately loves a man and a
woman (7, 12). By placing her narrators in a series of different situ-
ations she anticipates Judith Butler’s conclusion in Gender Trouble
that “the ‘coherence’ and ‘continuity’ of the ‘person’ are not logical

or analytic features of personhood but, rather, socially instituted”
(17). Her undressing as a form of cross-dressing works because it
enacts the kind of transvestism Marjorie Garber defines as “a space
of possibility structuring and confounding culture: the disruptive ele-
ment that intervenes, not just a category crisis of male and female,
but the crisis of category itself ” (17).29 In this way Cahun’s project is
also pertinently surrealist and follows Elizabeth Wright’s idea that
Bretonian surrealism aims at “‘the failure of the category’” in its
subversive “disturbance of the structure of our old desires” (275).30
Indeed, in the “Manifesto,” Breton wrote, “Our brains are dulled by
the incurable mania of wanting to make the unknown known, clas-
sifiable,” an activity linked to categorizing that he clearly opposes
despite the paradox that he devoted his life to exploring multiple
manifestations of the psychic unknown (Manifestoes 9).31
The head’s distortion in Human Frontier casts doubt on the sub-
ject’s classifiability as human, and this is what makes it ghostly. Could
this be a different sort of being? To what expanded frontier of human
possibility has Cahun extended this head, which seems to illustrate
what Elza Adamowicz has called the “exploded space” of the head
within surrealism (“Monsters” 297)? In twentieth-century American
popular culture, the shape of Cahun’s head in Human Frontier is
immediately associated with the Coneheads from Saturday Night
Live, whose elongated heads identified them as aliens in a gesture not
unlike Cahun’s. What exactly is familiar about this head, she seems
to be asking, and what is strange? It typifies Freud’s insistence on the
conceptual and linguistic instability of the notion of the uncanny
(Masschelein, “Concept” 65). It also illuminates Bataille’s dissident
surrealist idea of the informe, or formlessness, which he defined in
Documents in December 1929, possibly around the time Cahun was
shooting Human Frontier, as “a term serving to declassify” the aca-
demic impulse to see “the universe take on a form” (“Critical” 51–52).
For while she professed a deep attachment to Breton and Bretonian
surrealism, she inevitably also came close to the ideas circulating in
Bataille’s group, if only through her friendship with Desnos (whose

portrait she shot the same year), so that it is not surprising to see a
melding of both Breton’s and Bataille’s aesthetics united in this work.
Cahun’s head thus enacts what Rosalind Krauss has described
as “the job” of the Bataillian informe in surrealist photography: to
challenge the illusion of “wholeness” that, according to Krauss, is
promoted unproblematically by realist photography and that sup-
posedly allows a spectator to experience a moment of hallucinatory
recognition whereby his or her own subjectivity is perceived as il-
lusory, unified (“Corpus” 95).32 In Disavowals Cahun specifically
embraces Bataille’s push toward declassification. Using the verb
déclasser, meaning “to downgrade” but also referring to that which
is not readily classifiable, she insists, “J’ai la manie de l’exception. . . .
Ainsi je me déclasse exprès. Tant pis pour moi [I’m obsessed with
the exception. . . . This is how I deliberately downgrade myself. That’s
too bad for me]” (Ecrits 367; Disavowals 152, translation modified).
Human Frontier is in fact exemplary of at least two styles of surre-
alist photography: the manipulated (informe) style extolled by Krauss
after Bataille and the realist (straight) style after Breton, admired by
Walker, Roberts, and Geoffrey Batchen. It reveals aspects of Cahun
as she actually looked and yet masks this look by distortion. For it
is not necessary to see Human Frontier as exemplary of the informe
to understand it as surrealist, as Walker asserts: “‘Surrealist docu-
mentary’ photography is in fact more disruptive of conventional
norms than the contrivance of darkroom manipulation” (3). Cahun’s
self-portraits constitute a visual diary that is realistic, even docu-
mentary. Yet their self-conscious awareness constitutes a record of
a singular life emphatically pitted against any attempt at pigeonhol-
ing it, according to Roberts’s sense of the counter-archive and even
more in the manner of Derrida’s Freudian definition of the archive
as oscillating. Because while seeming to provide a category — a re-
cord of one recognizable person’s life — Cahun defeats the proposed
categorization and recognizability of her subject.
To repeat Derrida: “The archive always works, and a priori, against
itself ” (Archive 12). This strategy, visible in Cahun’s serial photo-

graphs, may explain why she claimed to prefer disguises when she
went out, for, disguised, she was both herself and another. Thus
physically and in real life she displayed the instability that would
challenge the unitary and bounded notion of the self. “One evening,
thanks to some sort of disguise, I crossed the threshold,” she writes
(Disavowals 78). Her biographer François Leperlier describes her as
frequently dying her hair exotic colors such as pink, gold, and silver
(Photographe 10). He affirms that her entire life “Claude Cahun played
with masks,” which “she bought on a regular basis” and “liked to wear
at home with friends or visitors” (L’écart 111, my translation). When
one is obviously adopting a style of dress as a form of expression,
the ghost of the alternate persona, the one that is being disguised,
hovers visibly around the mask in an oscillating display of alternate
identities.
Autobiographical Shadows
Surrealism has always tended toward the autobiographical, beginning
with the question that opens Breton’s Nadja — “Who am I?” — a ques-
tion that allows Breton to mediate his encounter with the mysterious
woman called Nadja (11). Hollier argues that the shadow of the real
conveyed in autobiographical writing distinguishes it from fiction
and makes it essential to the surrealist project: “Breton wants tales
that would be more realistic than the novel. . . . Breton gives both the
names and the snapshots of the beings who enter his book [Nadja]”
(“Precipitates” 126). In Disavowals Cahun stages autobiography’s
lack of transparency with the use of reversal and negation. The book
opens with the poetic image of an “invisible adventure” which may
be imagined from the perspective of a photographer, who, seeing
rather than being seen, can feel “invisible” and whose “adventure”
involves capturing light on a negative (1). This idea of the photo-
graphic negative appears textually in the book’s opening section,
where the word no is an echo of the palindromic non at the pivotal
center of the French title for Disavowals, Aveux non avenus: “No.
I’ll trace the wake of vessels in the air, the pathway over the waters,

the pupil’s mirage. . . . I want to hunt myself down, struggle with
myself ” (1). This initial no haunts the affirmations that follow and
reveals them for the shadows they are: a wake, a pathway, a mirage.
What Cahun seeks as the author of Disavowals is elusive; it is
“the pupil’s mirage,” a glimpse of self in the eyes of another or in the
“eye” of a camera or in a mirror, a reverse image like a photographic
negative. In fact she prefers this shadowy double to her own body,
as she suggests: “I get in my shadow’s way quite horribly and can’t
escape her” (173, translation modified). It is the body that cannot
be escaped, whereas the shadow double is bearable because, like a
photographic image, it can be manipulated and shaped.33 Still more
important, perhaps, the shadow bears witness to a ghostly presence,
to a person having been there, having existed. Yet this enigmatic text,
like her photographs, particularly her bell jar photographs, leaves
her still unknowable and untouchable, unlike the rendition of her
bust in Human Frontier.
Human Frontier is more empathetic than Disavowals and her bell
jar photographs because, as a bust rather than a head, it is more of
a corps than the fragmented corpus found in her autobiographi-
cal book. To return to Hollier’s reading of Leiris’s autobiographi-
cal interpretation of a severed head, we can say that Cahun’s bust
in Human Frontier is anything but severed or disembodied, even
though the figure’s body does disappear beneath the black cloth.34
Her Human Frontier does not represent a head in search of its body
because, with its hyperbolic exaggeration, it already is body. Cahun
distorts the Cartesian thinking head by stretching and material-
izing it and by refusing to give it a singular gender identification.
Her autobiographical image begins and ends with the head, which,
through the head’s distortion, already is clearly embodied. Cahun
shocks us, her viewers, into recognizing in her self-image a glimpse
of ourselves — not of the “wholeness” that Krauss claims for straight
photography but of our most poignantly touchable mortality, which
we feel even as we resist the knowledge and repress it. At the same
time, insofar as it has the characteristics of a straight photograph,

Human Frontier represents the sort of enhancement of the real that,
as Walker has argued, is typical of some surrealist photography and
that is also reminiscent of the supplement to psychic reality that spirit
photographers sought to reveal. Cahun’s exaggerated realism invites
the viewer to identify with the photograph’s ambiguous subject and
to recognize within himself or herself a comparable ambiguity.
For both the manipulated and the straight aspects of this photo-
graph represent an enhancement that contains within it the ghost
or “spirit” of a disappeared, nonenhanced original, like the real hu-
man body we involuntarily imagine when we look at a surrealist
exquisite corpse drawing or the logical poem we half hear in our
minds as we read aloud Desnos’s “Rrose Sélavy” poems. Just as a
negation carries within it the kernel of the negated affirmation, so
does an enhanced photograph carry within it the ghost of a non-
exaggerated version which can be apprehended more readily than
it can actually be seen, like the distorted skull in Holbein’s work.
Such enhancements, whether through magnification, framing, or
darkroom manipulation, carry within them a ghostly reminder of
other possibilities. Cahun also seems to hint that this head has ac-
cess to worlds other than the one represented or even reasonably
imaginable. In its familiar strangeness it compels us to understand
ourselves as less familiar and more partial than we might think we
are.
One might argue that autobiography, for Cahun as well as for
Leiris, starts with the head, that egg-like form out of which thoughts
“hatch.” To see Human Frontier as autobiographical, since it is of
Cahun as well as by her, is to presuppose a double reading that would
have been understood only by her friends in 1930, who knew what
she looked like. The writing identifying the photograph’s title and
subject — Human Frontier and “Claude Cahun” — identify and mirror
the image. The writing and the photograph together in mirror rela-
tion, with Cahun’s bust at the top and her name and the title below,
reinforce the sense that a photograph is closer to writing, particularly
surrealist automatic writing, as Krauss has argued, than to a painted

or sculpted image because it represents the graphic imprint of light
on photosensitive paper, “a photochemically processed trace causally
connected to that thing in the world to which it refers in a manner
parallel to that of fingerprints or footprints or the rings of water
that cold glasses leave on tables” (“Photographic” 110).35 In Human
Frontier text and image both identify Cahun as a person named
Claude Cahun and as a living body representative of the human at
its “frontier.”
Human Frontier invites the viewer to see at least double: to look
up, down, and behind the human head; to look at and with the
head’s gaze; to imagine a man and to see the ghost of a woman;
to wonder which is more human and to crisscross the boundaries
between them. This double vision, typical of surrealist ghostliness
and encouraging an apprehension of both the image before our eyes
and its ghostly alternatives, distances Cahun’s work from Cartesian
clarity, sublimation, transcendence, and abstraction. It gives body
back to thought and blurs the subject’s singularity in the best sur-
realist tradition. For the surrealists, identity is anything but stable;
rather it is more like a flow of inner psychic forces. Human Frontier
suggests that it is human to see at least double, to feel double, if not
multiple, in response to the voices Breton hoped to capture with
his image of the automatist’s body as a recording instrument or his
parallel evocation of surrealist objects as generating “force fields”
(“Crise” 22). The first automatic phrase Breton overheard visualized
a double awareness of the self as divided between conscious and
unconscious realities, at once divided and yet mutually accessible:
“There is a man cut in two by the window” (Manifestoes 21). This
window, in turn, recalls the “unsilvered glass” from the opening
section of Breton and Soupault’s inaugural automatic text, with the
spiritualistic title The Magnetic Fields (23). In a mirror we see a ver-
sion of the self. Through unsilvered glass, as with a camera lens,
one can possibly see through the glass into an unknown magnetic
dimension, the unknown inner self, seen as a ghost like those that
fascinated spiritualists.

For Cahun, only images and texts that shed light on those ghostly
dimensions haunting the visible come close to capturing the human
experience in its full complexity, in its fully three-dimensional, tactile
mortality. She adds depth and sensuality to Breton’s material pun
for the human body because, unlike Desnos’s bottle and Eluard’s
house, she shows that that unfamiliar haunted object can also be the
self. Such a conclusion was not difficult for a woman surrealist to
make, since the body as the vessel for automatic revelation had long
been gendered feminine. The iconic photograph of Cahun’s head in
Human Frontier enacts a haunting of the present by a past moment
that had literally touched the negative out of which the image has
emerged. It is thus Cahun’s photograph that is most representative
of the medium in which she worked. In the hands of this surrealist
archivist, photography, at once a technology of distance, rigidity, and
objectivity, is restored to its most indexical, tactile, and hence ghostly
origins, imbuing surrealist ghostliness with enhanced sensuality. In
this emphasis on tactility she also anticipates the collaboration of
the Hungarian photographer Brassaï with Dalí on a series of images
called Involuntary Sculptures, published in Minotaure in 1933, which
also invoke photography’s connection to the sense of touch, as we
shall see in the next chapter.

3
The Ethnographic
Automatism of Brassaï and
Dalí’s Involuntary Sculptures
The surreal exists within us, in the things which have

become so banal that we no longer notice them, and in
the normality of the normal.
Brassaï, speech at unesco banquet, 1963, quoted in
Annick Lionel-Marie, “Letting the Eye Be Light”
In Brassaï (born Gyula Halasz in Brasso, Transylvania) and Sal-

vador Dalí’s collaboration for the surrealist art journal Minotaure
in 1933 on a series of photographs titled Sculptures involontaires
(henceforth Involuntary Sculptures), ghostliness emerges from the
anamorphic ambiguity of the images (see fig. 13). These found objects
are “involuntary” in the sense that they were made automatically:
absentmindedly shaped and rolled bus tickets, a toothpaste blob,
shaving cream, and a roll captured to look like an ancient stone
statue. The distorted magnification that photography brings to these
objects reveals their ghostliness because, while recognizably inert,
their distended shapes contribute to the illusion of animation they
project. Brassaï thought of this look as baroque, a style that leads
one astray like a dream. “Il déroute comme le songe,” he wrote in
1962, in an essay in which he describes baroque statues so organically
lifelike that they come to life: “Les statues baroques s’animent.” For
him the baroque style “explodes” into works that are “primitive,” by
which he means the Sicilian baroque but also objects like these (“La
69
13. Brassaï (Gyula
Halász, 1899–1984),
Sculptures involontaires, in
Minotaure 3–4 (1933): 68.
© Estate Brassaï — rmn.
Digital image © Museum
of Modern Art / Licensed
by scala / Art Resource,
New York.
Villa” 351). Dalí, in his essay on Modern Style architecture for which
Involuntary Sculptures serves as a visual preface, extends Brassaï’s
view of the baroque to include Barcelona’s modern architecture by
Antonio Gaudí and the public ironwork by Hector Guimard deco-
rating Parisian metro stations.
The series of six photographs that constitute Involuntary Sculp-
tures, initially labeled “large-scale” or “automatic objects,” shot by
Brassaï and privately annotated by Dalí,1 constitute an archive in
the counter-archival sense that John Roberts attributes to surrealist
photography because of their intimacy and because they represent
things that are disposable — the opposite of objects normally com-
memorated in a public archive. They embody what Steven Harris
has called a “refusal of professional status” since anyone could make
them (“Coup” 96).2 The previous issue of Minotaure had featured
explicitly ethnographic photographs of Dogon masks and dances
70 Brassaï and Dalí’s Involuntary Sculptures

in an essay by Leiris, as part of that issue’s report on the Dakar-
Djibouti mission of 1931–33 sponsored by the Trocadéro Museum
of Ethnography, in which Leiris participated. Involuntary Sculptures
also constitute an ethnographic study of unconsciously produced
contemporary art made by ordinary Parisians. Like Ray’s tacks and
pins in Retour à la raison, these things pop with unlikely sentience,
confusingly animate. Like Cahun’s self-portrait Human Frontier,
they ask viewers what we know and how we know as human be-
ings. Unlike Ray’s and Cahun’s objects, however, Brassaï’s sentient
things serve a cultural, even anthropological function: they teach us
about ourselves as humans based on the things we make, use, and
throw away. Brassaï explains that for him, photography was the art
of giving “things the chance to express themselves” (in Sayag 15). The
psychological dimension he sees in inert things is ethnographically
emblematic of surrealist ghostliness.
From Spiritualism to Ethnography

Ethnography superseded psychoanalysis as a scientific method for
the surrealists in the 1930s, offering a new way to study the unknown
and explore the psychic geography of people, habits, and objects
through a marriage of science and art in the shape of photography.
Like the Minotaur for whom they named their journal for this decade
(1933–37),3 they began to think of human beings as not only living
psychoanalytically with the duality of conscious and unconscious
minds, symbolized by the Minotaur’s dual nature as animal and
human, but also as living in a labyrinth that the receptive surreal-
ist could not only survive but decode. Increasingly the “forest of
symbols” by which they were surrounded extended beyond Paris
and involved objects.4 Ethnography was the science that could help
them understand better the environment in which they lived and
their interactions with it.
Brassaï was motivated by the belief that “we know more about
the habits of the pygmy or African bushman than we do about a
Parisian from the rue des Solitaires” (in Warehime 89). He and Dalí
Brassaï and Dalí’s Involuntary Sculptures 71

turn their ethnographic attention away from ceremonial objects
from distant cultures to local, Parisian objects involved in everyday
ceremonies, such as preparing to go to work in the morning. Yet
the way they photographed these objects transformed them into
magical things. In other words, the act of photography conjures as
much transformative magic as the act of dancing in a ceremonial
masked dance. Indeed the geographies the surrealists found in their
own backyard, so to speak, were foreign and strange enough that
they might as well have been as distant as Central Africa or even
farther out of this world, like the ghostly spirits that preoccupied
the nineteenth-century spiritualists, who also explored the unknown
using both science and art in the form of spirit photography.
In her study of Brassaï as a “surrealist observer,” Marja Ware-
hime qualifies his photographs of Paris as ethnographic because
of his desire “for an ‘ethnology’ — the equivalent of U.S. ‘cultural
anthropology’ — of more advanced societies.” She views Brassaï’s
photographic mission to capture the seedy side of Paris in Paris by
Night (1932) as illustrative of James Clifford’s definition of the con-
vergence of ethnography and surrealism in “ethnographic surreal-
ism” (89).5 Clifford explains that “ethnography cut with surrealism
emerges as the theory and practice of juxtaposition,” whose effects
involved what Benjamin called the discovery of “profane illumina-
tion, a materialistic, anthropological inspiration,” in their everyday
world and in the material objects populating that world (Clifford
147; Benjamin, Reflections 179, 190). Roger Cardinal confirms that
the surrealists valued “all objects capable of waking us up” (“Arts”
63, my translation).
With Involuntary Sculptures Dalí and Brassaï use an approach at
once archival and ethnographic to “wake up” Western viewers to their
own rituals based on the moment of recognition or disconcerting
“illumination” that the viewer experiences in seeing this photographic
study of trash objects that reveal key information about our every-
day lives: shaving, brushing teeth, consuming bread, or boarding
the bus. This revelation connects to surrealist ghostliness through

the fact that these rituals are largely unconsciously executed; they
constitute the latent, hidden support to our public selves, a latency
Dalí and Brassaï clearly sought to bring to light so that our most
private everyday lives might be visible in an art journal of the sort
that usually commemorates more illustrious accomplishments. This
desire to expose the duality of latent and manifest activities in our
lives is anamorphic in a manner analogous to Holbein’s Ambas-
sadors, in the ways each aspect ties into our sense of mortality: the
private rituals of daily body maintenance we perform to ward off
aging parallel Holbein’s distorted skull, while the public material
traces of long-lasting accomplishments we hope to leave behind as
our legacies parallel the ambassadors’ worldly magnificence.
Surrealist Primitivism and Ghostliness

Brassaï and Dalí respond with their Involuntary Sculptures to Leiris’s
understanding of the way the masks function in Dogon culture,
created for a ceremonial use that activates significant powers before
being casually discarded. To objects considered “primitive” in 1933,
they respond with a surrealist version of primitivism that, like the
masks that attracted them, similarly involves a double understanding
of the object as a thing and a being, a sculpture and a thing sacralized
by ritual. And they present their primitivist objects ethnographically,
locating “the primitive” in their own modern European culture.
In his essay “Dogon Masks” for Minotaure’s second issue, Leiris
reproduced impressive examples of Dogon artistry and showed how
the masks were used in religious dances. His text emphasizes the
power of each mask: when wearing a mask, the dancer could speak
only a secret language; becoming unmasked during a ceremony
could result in death; if a woman came in contact with a mask she
could become possessed, the mask having “taken her head.” With
reference to L’Afrique fantôme, the memoir Leiris published about
the trip, Ian Walker has emphasized the ghostliness of the photo-
graphs that accompany the essay: “the mask was now only seen
through the photograph, seen as a ‘phantom,’” showing how “what

we call a document can be — indeed must be — threaded through
with enculturation, with subjectivity, with desire” (201).
Leiris concludes his essay on Dogon masks with a photograph
of discarded masks left to rot. He thus confirmed a strongly held
impression that for people like the Dogon such creations were not art
but ceremonial, functional objects, more religious than aesthetic. The
mistaken view that masks like these were not valued was described
by Thomas McEvilley in his well-known critique of the Primitivism
exhibition of 1984:
In their native contexts these objects were invested with feelings
of awe and dread, not of esthetic ennoblement. They were seen
usually in motion, at night, in closed dark spaces, by flickering
torchlight. . . . Above all, they were activated by the presence
within or among the objects themselves of the shaman, acting
out the usually terrifying power represented by the mask or icon.
What was at stake for the viewer was not esthetic appreciation
but loss of self in identification with and support of the shamanic
performance. . . . Many primitive groups, when they have used an
object ritually (sometimes only once), desacralize it and discard
it as garbage. (In Flam and Deutsch 346–47)6
In “Summary Instructions,” which Leiris cowrote with Marcel Gri-
aule, the leader of the Dakar-Djibouti trip, they confirm this view
as well as their interest in everyday objects: “Gather all possible
objects, everyday or not. All objects are aesthetic to some degree”
(in Kelly 72). For Leiris, as an ethnographer and a surrealist, the
everyday object had a value equivalent to the high-art object, a fact
that “tempts a comparison with the surrealist interest in the ‘found
object,’” according to Julia Kelly (72).
Dalí had already published essays on the object in the surrealist
journals that preceded Minotaure, La Révolution surréaliste and Le
Surréalisme au service de la révolution.7 For Dalí as for Ray, Breton,
and the other surrealists, objects assist in the process of exploring
life’s labyrinth by clarifying desires and drives. Dalí first exhibited

objects, which he characterized as typical of the Modern Style, at
the Pierre Colle Gallery in 1931 in a show that also featured the first
of his anamorphic, double-image paintings, including The Invisible
Man (1929–32) (see Ades, Dalí 158; Ades, Dalí’s Optical 78).8 For Dalí,
these objects were at least double; like the Western understanding
of the African mask or sculpture as a fetish (see Pietz), they incor-
porate spiritual and psychological functions and thus embody the
doubleness typical of surrealist ghostliness. Like African objects,
surrealist objects are tactile as well as visual, invoking what Tzara (in
the same issue of Minotaure as Involuntary Sculptures) identified as
the “intrauterine desires” triggered by African art and founded on
nonvisual tactile experiences from “pre-natal memory” (“Concern-
ing” 210, 209).
Dalí and Brassaï feature the way touch selects these ordinary
objects in a manner parallel to the way Ray’s deployment of photo-
graphic tactility made collector’s items out of ordinary things and
imbued them with aura, despite Benjamin’s insistence in “The Work
of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” that mechanical
reproductions and, by correlation, mechanically produced things
like bus tickets have lost the aura typical of a handmade, unique
work of art. Dalí’s and Brassaï’s ordinary objects have acquired the
history Benjamin ascribes to aura (what Tzara calls “patina”). In the
transposition from something handmade to something handled,
they became sculptures as well, even though human hands made
them involuntarily, automatically, even unconsciously, according
to what Breton, in “The Automatic Message” (in the same issue of
Minotaure), calls the “subliminal message” to which the receptive
surrealist remains attuned (Break 138).
Also published in the same issue of Minotaure, in an essay on
graffiti art, Brassaï claims that ethnographic thinking has made all
people equal, throughout history: “In the light of ethnography, an-
tiquity becomes youth, the Stone Age a state of mind” (“Du mur”
6, my translation).9 He conforms to the commonly held view at
the time that so-called primitive people live outside of history,10

but he asserts a European primitive equivalent by comparing Paris
graffiti to drawings from the prehistoric caves of Lascaux and the
treasures of Egypt, as though all these art forms were contempora-
neous, sharing an equivalent éclat de la vie (burst of life). Following
on Carl Einstein’s “Negro Sculpture” (1915), which describes African
sculpture as religious, preserving a “hermetic mythic reality” capable
of transforming a worshipper “into a mythic being and dissolving
his human existence,” Brassaï sees graffiti as having the power of a
surrealist object, an African mask, or an Oceanic shield (130–31).
In an essay from 1962, Brassaï uses the words primitive and dream
to characterize the Sicilian baroque as “a movement leading art in
new directions, crossing ‘the threshold of the irrational to give rise
to primitive, exotic, even barbaric works of art’” that function “like
a dream” (in Warehime 96). He links the baroque tradition to sur-
realist automatism and also to the surrealist love for non-Western
art. With its history of representing contained illusions of infinity,
the desacralized, surrealist baroque applies very well to surreal-
ist dreams, through the distortion of time involved in surrealist
dreamtime or an automatic experience, in which an entire dream
sequence can flash by in an instant. In “The Automatic Message,”
Breton defines surrealist automatism as relying on a “verbal out-
flow” that has a “primitive direction” and uses spiritualist and me-
diumistic art to prove his point (Break 131, translation modified).11
He implicitly suggests that surrealists and “primitive peoples” act
similarly when surrealists experiment with automatism because of a
desire to access unconscious knowledge. Both shared a high regard
for what he called authenticity according to the current colonialist
understanding of primitive peoples and the objects they made as
static, frozen in time (143).12 He paradoxically illustrated this new
affirmation of surrealist over spiritualist automatism with medi-
umistic art made by Western “primitives” because of the similarity
he identified between mediumistic drawing and the Modern Style
Art Nouveau architecture discussed by Dalí in the same issue, thus
anticipating his wholesale embrace of mediumistic art in the 1950s.

For the surrealists, dreams and “the primitive” were thus united in
automatism, which in Breton’s “Automatic Message” emerges as a
surrealist version of primitivism — Western art influenced by non-
Western art forms — transposed onto experience.
The surrealist admiration for so-called authenticity crystallized
by the “primitive flow” valued by both the surrealists and so-called
primitive peoples also implicitly links the products that result from
these activities: surrealist automatic writing, drawing, and object
making, infused with psychic latencies, on the one hand, and the
masks and statuettes made by artisans in Africa and Oceania for re-
ligious ceremonies and infused with spiritual latencies, on the other.
Both kinds of objects involved a ghostly repressed energy. Once the
African and Oceanic objects the surrealists collected showed up in
European markets, their latent spiritual powers were desacralized
and repressed but did not disappear; they were interpreted by the
surrealists as psychological forces similar to the powers they discov-
ered in their own objects.
The connection between European objects and the non-Western
objects surrealists collected became even more explicit in the sur-
realist exhibition at the Charles Ratton Gallery in May 1936, which
included masks from Breton’s and Eluard’s personal collections of
Oceanic and African art, Duchamp’s readymade Bottlerack (which
in this context looks almost like an exotic headdress), and objects
found and made by other surrealists like Ray, Cahun, and Dalí. These
non-Western and Western objects fulfilled a similar psychological
purpose in the Ratton show, as Elza Adamowicz explains, through
the way the non-Western mask, in particular, can put into play “sur-
realism’s double goal of integration and disintegration, of totalization
and fragmentation, [and as such] represents an equivocal space, a
figure of alterity, and a site where the other in the same/the self can
surge forth, where the surreal appears at the very heart of the real”
(“Masque” 91, my translation).
All of the objects the surrealists admired, collected, and made
exhibit the repressed energy of the ghostly because they were turned

away from their original function — a mask from its initial religious
purpose, Duchamp’s Bottlerack from drying bottles in a café. The
repression of these objects’ formerly manifest lives into latencies
transformed those latencies into the psychic “force fields” Breton
identified with objects in “Crisis of the Object” (“Crise” 22, my
translation). Involuntary Sculptures similarly emanate “force fields”
of ghostliness — the way they look like two things at once, simulta-
neously permanent and permeable, solid and ephemeral, familiar
and strange, inanimate and organic, man-made and natural. Their
magnification endows them with a dreamlike quality in the manner
of Brassaï’s version of the baroque, at once a trigger for illusion and
a reminder of tactile materiality, because at the very instant that
they strike the viewer as possibly exotic, a disconcerting instant of
psychic illumination makes the viewer understand that they are,
on the contrary, material evidence of the most ordinary activities
attendant to a normative urban life.13
Involuntary Sculptures: Irrational Beauty

The desire to see Western and non-Western, modern and ancient
people and artifacts in the same light informs the combined issue of
Minotaure. In “The Automatic Message,” for example, Breton declares
that surrealism’s “distinctive feature is to have proclaimed the total
equality of all normal human beings before the subliminal message,
to have constantly maintained that this message constitutes a com-
mon patrimony, of which everyone is entitled to a share, and which
must very soon, and at all costs, stop being seen as the prerogative of
the chosen few” (Break 138). Brassaï and Dalí’s Involuntary Sculptures,
as well as Brassaï’s essay on graffiti art and Tzara’s “Concerning a
Certain Automatism of Taste,” similarly put objects made by Western
and non-Western people on an equal plane.
The “alterity” that Adamowicz identifies with rituals linked to
masks of the sort described by Leiris could also be attributed to the
1930s Parisian’s daily rituals: both emerge from the “primitive flow”
Breton describes. Brassaï and Dalí pay attention to the unconscious

art-making ability of ordinary people. They show how automatism
awakens that ability, which exists in a latent state in every human
being, and through their series of six magnified examples they make
this demonstration ethnographic. These photographs illustrate the
mechanisms of surrealist ghostliness by making this latent, wide-
spread ability manifestly visible.
The photographic lens transforms Brassaï’s Involuntary Sculptures
through magnification, making their beauty suddenly and startlingly
visible in the photographic instant. They “spring out of the shadows,”
Jean-François Revel has observed, and evoke alternative worlds of
dreams and desire (68, my translation). Brassaï argued that his ver-
sion of surrealism was “only reality made more eerie by [his] way of
seeing”: “I never sought to express anything but reality itself, than
which there is nothing more surreal” (in Sayag 14). The first two
Sculptures are more or less recognizable for what they are, rolled
bus tickets, and invite a flash of recognition for all those private
moments spent toying mindlessly — automatically — with a piece of
paper. These photographs have the psychological effect of questioning
the meaning of involuntary play, in the way that Freud discovered
that meaning might be extracted from the recital of a person’s dreams,
the leftovers of everyday activities, which, like jokes and slips of the
tongue, can sometimes be automatic because derived from the un-
conscious mind. Could truths about the self and humanity lurk in
such automatic creations, made even less consciously (or, in Brassaï
and Dali’s terms, less “voluntarily”) than Bretonian automatic writing,
which the surrealist sets out to do with deliberation? These images
are linked by their disposability to the broken pots examined closely
in archaeological excavations, the everyday trash that identifies an
era — the way, for example, the scroll design on the bus ticket marks
it as a pre–World War II artifact, scientific treasure buried in detritus.
At first glance the fourth Sculpture looks like an enlarged pho-
tograph of an exotic flower, of the sort Blossfeldt immortalized in
Documents.14 What looks like the glossy petals of an insect-eating
plant turns out to be a blob of toothpaste. The caption underscores

the object’s accidental beauty: “Morphological chance of smudged
toothpaste does not escape fine and ornamental stereotyping” (68,
my translation). For a punning slip of the tongue (Freud’s famous
pipe for a penis), Brassaï and Dalí replace a slip of the eye. Nothing
turns out to be what it might appear to be at first glance, just like
Desnos’s automatic “Rrose Sélavy” poems, which generate verbal
and visual confusions based on the resemblances of the syllables to
one another. Involuntary Sculptures generates comparable confu-
sions between what is in the image and what the viewer subliminally
projects onto it.
The captions to these images, almost certainly written by Dalí,
whose style is recognizable in the essay that follows them, “The Ter-
rifying and Edible Beauty of Modern Style Architecture” (transla-
tion modified), tie Involuntary Sculptures to Dalí’s concepts through
shared references to the Modern Style and through their adjacent
placement, facing Dalí’s essay.15 Modern Style, usually a synonym for
Art Nouveau, also designates an exaggerated form of Art Nouveau.
This accords with Dalí’s appreciation of its anachronism, which he
admired for being “real and living” at the same time that it is “authen-
tically spectral,” as he wrote in 1934 (Collected 253). He also admired
the Modern Style for its resistance “to the modernist imperative of
contemporaneity,” as Roger Rothman argues.16 Dalí suggests that his
and Brassaï’s Modern Style Involuntary Sculptures are like African
masks in their everydayness and discardability as well as in their
ghostly or spectral beauty.
All six Sculptures with their double identities anamorphically
co-evoke an animate creature and an inanimate thing. What Dalí
calls an “elementary” cigar turns out to be nothing more than an
absentmindedly rolled bus ticket; his ancient stone goddess is only
an ornamental bread; the blown glass at a second glance resolves into
a soap bubble, just as what he describes as an exotic bloom emerges
as a smudge of toothpaste. Because these things are presented in an
art journal, it is easy to overestimate their provenance, in keeping
with the beauty these enhanced images lend them. On a second look

we realize that Dalí and Brassaï have been joking with their serious
viewers and have created visual puns that work like Desnos’s “Rrose
Sélavy” poems and Duchamp’s Bottlerack in the Ratton Gallery. After
a double take in an anamorphic retrospective glance, the two images
suddenly come together, while remaining haunted by their doubles.
The false first impression falls away as easily as a mask. Unmasked,
their briefly flowering beauty retracts, and they disappear. Looking
activates their ghostliness, turning them involuntarily into surrealist
psychological objects and anamorphically reversible images. Shot in
tight close-up, with an almost irrational degree of attention, these
ephemera are transformed by what Dalí identified in a 1927 essay on
photography as “an imperceptible tipping, a wise displacement in the
spatial sense, so that — under the pressure of the tepid fingertips and
the nickel-plated spring — out of the pure crystalline objectivity of
the glass there emerges a spiritual bird of thirty-six greys and forty
new manners of inspiration” (Collected 46).
Decontextualization morphs the found objects into the sign of a
receptive individual’s desire, “an emissary from the external world,”
argues Krauss (“Photography” 35). Their disposability distinguishes
these objects from Ray’s rayographs. Not merely industrial and made
for public consumption like Ray’s combs, glasses, and keys, these
involuntarily created objects will be eaten, washed down the drain, or
thrown away after a single use. These objects constitute an archive in
Derrida’s sense, a collection of shifting figures that oscillate between
the pleasure principle — the desire to live — and the death drive, the
obsolescence of the everyday object. Their organic appearance lends
them their greatest ghostly power and links them to Modern Style
architecture through “the formal automatic similarity between the
curved and undulating shapes of these moulded, squeezed, pressed
and rolled fragments and the grand organic shapes of art nouveau
architecture” (Ades, Dalí 162). In the short statement Dalí wrote
for the brochure created for his exhibition at the Pierre Colle Gal-
lery in 1931, he insists that Modern Style objects “reveal in the most
material way the persistence of dream through reality” because an

examination of them reveals “hallucinatory dreamlike elements”
(my translation). Involuntary Sculptures, like Modern Style objects,
are both organic and automatic; both can transport, transform, and
appeal to the liveliness in the viewer, a psychological liveliness. The
ghosts in these photographs reflect traces of the self: one’s mystical,
even spiritual relationship with the self.
Edible Architecture
Dalí’s essay “The Terrifying and Edible Beauty of Modern Style Ar-
chitecture” focuses on buildings created by Gaudí in Barcelona and
ornamental sculpture designed by Guimard for entrances to the
Paris metro that could be characterized as baroque. They exemplify
surrealist ghostliness for Dalí, who sees in their style the coexistence
of extremes whereby one extreme can easily flip into its opposite.
For Dalí, Modern Style or Art Nouveau architecture and sculpture
perfectly combined the oppositional forces of soft and hard. Edibility
was a trait he ascribed to surrealist works; in “The Object as Revealed
in Surrealist Experiment” from 1932 he traces its origin to the pres-
ence of “eatables” in the paintings of Chirico (95). Yet architecture
is hard, even if it looks soft, and Gaudí’s architecture is also often
iridescent, gilded with shiny mosaic bits, just as it is inspired by
the tall, strong arches of gothic architecture, which Gaudí accepted
as “the most advanced and autonomous style” (Solá-Morales 341).
Like Involuntary Sculptures, the Modern Style releases latent desires,
primarily the overwhelming urge to consume it.
In an essay published in a later issue of Minotaure, “The New
Colors of Spectral Sex-Appeal,” Dalí makes explicit this ghostly pres-
ence when he explains how he negotiates the labyrinth of human
desire. He describes his reliance on opposing ghostly guides, whom
he identifies as the Phantom (linked to sex appeal) and the Specter
(linked to decomposition), showcasing an ambivalence symptomatic
of “attraction-repulsion, sexuality and its denial,” linked to his “at-
tempt to return to the primal pleasure related to the lost world of
childhood” (Collected 159). Phantomatic, in Dalí’s terms, Modern

Style is also spectral, rooted in mortality, in flesh. It is also archival in
its actively oscillating capacity to mobilize desires while awakening
the premonition of mortality. When we desire and eat, we are most
alive, and our very liveliness anticipates our mortality, our future
putridity.
Dalí characterizes “the delirious Modern Style architecture as
the most original and the most extraordinary phenomenon in the
history of art” (Collected 194, translation modified). He argues that
this “hysterical” style attacks reason with its metamorphic nature,
according to which the gothic is transformed into Greek, Asian,
and then Renaissance styles. It provokes antirational “positive lyri-
cal stupidity,” the way that his own paranoiac-critical method does
(198).17 He explicitly links its “hysteria” to sexuality: its sculptured
images represent “continuous erotic ecstasy.” “Contractions and at-
titudes that are unprecedented in the history of the art of statuary”
are characterized by an “anal-sadistic complex,” “glaring ornamental
coprophagia,” and “very slow and exhausting onanism, accompanied
by acute guilt feelings” (198). With this eccentric, highly subjective if
not grotesque focus on Modern Style’s subversive eroticism and op-
position to Cartesian reason,18 Dalí’s revisionist position is consistent
both with surrealism and with French ethnography in the 1930s. As
Michèle Richman has pointed out, both “drew insights from other
cultures into modes of thought resistant to the definition of logic
sanctioned by the West” (“Anthropology” 192).
Dalí begins with the derisive judgment of his contemporaries that
Modern Style art looks like a “cake, an exhibitionist and ornamental
‘confectioner’s’ dessert” (Collected 197, translation modified).19 By the
early 1930s it had become unfashionable, and nothing is less desirable
than yesterday’s fashions, although styles from fifty years earlier can
once again enchant. His perceptive conclusion is that mixed into such
derisive comments are powerful and repressed feelings of desire.
He suggests that the snort of disdain, the “superiority complex,”
and the facial contractions provoked by the mention of Modern
Style represent an unconscious defense mechanism disguising and

repressing true responses of awe to “these terrifying and sublime
Modern Style ornamental structures” (193–94, translation modi-
fied). He explains that the “latent” or ghostly forces hidden behind
the style’s outward “manifestations” succeed in awakening “a kind of
great ‘primal hunger’” of the sort not felt since early childhood (194).
To the close-ups of Guimard’s ornaments for the Paris metro Dalí
adds the captions “Eat me!” and “Me, too!” literalizing the figurative
English expression “You look good enough to eat!” and also refer-
ring back to the “ornamental” bread Sculpture. He concludes with a
typical Dalinian reformulation of Breton’s aesthetic exclamation of
convulsiveness—“Beauty will be convulsive or will not be” (160,
translation modified)—from the end of Nadja: “Beauty will be edible
or will not be” (200).
It is the intensity of the general disdain for Art Nouveau in the
1930s that leads to the exaltation of Dalí’s conclusion. Once again
liveliness and desire evoke the intensity of lived experience to an
extreme that anamorphically anticipates death or an inanimate state.
Dalí dramatizes this reality with extreme reversals. The initial distaste
the Modern Style inspires disguises an overwhelming desire to taste
it, which, in turn, becomes excessive enough to turn into repulsion
before becoming celebration. Repulsion is inextricably linked to at-
traction, as Dalí clearly felt and as Bataille later explained. In explicitly
ethnographic terms Bataille stipulates, “Everything leads us to believe
that early human beings were brought together by disgust and by
common terror, by an insurmountable horror focused precisely on
what originally was the central attraction of their union” (in Hollier,
College 106). In each extreme lies the ghost of its opposite.
In his study of Modern Style, Dalí describes with irreverent exag-
geration how even for a supposedly nonprimitive Western person
like himself, a strong admiration for the beauty of Gaudí’s buildings
spills over into repulsion. He begins by accurately evoking Casa
Batlló (1904–06, photographed by Ray), with its baroque curves and
mosaic colors visibly inspired by water, and ends by dramatizing its
psychological effect as one of excessive desire grown into its opposite

when the plant anamorphs into an image of a grotesque spoon of
putrid flesh approaching a mouth. Dalí traces this transition in his
elaborate description of the water flowers that emerge from Casa
Batlló’s lavish swirls:
Gaudí has built a house according to the forms of the sea, “repre-
senting” the waves on a stormy day. Another one is made of tran-
quil lake water [Casa Batlló]. I’m not talking about disappointing
metaphors or fairy tales, etc. . . . These houses exist on the Paseo de
Gracia in Barcelona. They are real buildings, true sculptures of the
reflections of twilit clouds in water made possible by the recourse
to an immense and demented multicolored and gleaming mo-
saic, and to pointillist iridescense from which emerge the shapes
of spilled water, shapes of water spilling, shapes of stagnant water,
shapes of shimmering water, shapes of water curled by the wind, all
these shapes of water constructed by an asymmetrical, dynamic-
instantaneous succession of contours broken, syncopated, inter-
laced, and melted by “naturalist-stylized” water lilies, concretizing
themselves in eccentric, impure and annihilating convergences by
thick protuberances of fear, springing forth from the unbelievable
façade, at once contorted by every possible demented suffering
and by a latent and infinite calm which is equalled only by those
horrifying supreme and ripe minuscule flowers ready to be eaten
with a spoon, — [leading] to the rare, greasy and soft spoon of rot-
ten meat coming near. (Collected 198–200, translation modified)
The references to edible flowers here juxtaposed with the repel-
lant image of putrefying meat concretize Dalí’s argument about the
attraction-repulsion effect of Modern Style architecture, which also
reconciles his dialectic of the Phantom (something edible) and the
Specter (something decomposing).
As Dalí describes it, Modern Style architecture can also be un-
derstood as having a sacred quality according to the terms Bataille
later formulated as the attraction-repulsion power of the sacred. In
contrast to Leiris, who in his Minotaure essay described ritual dances

performed in a distant hemisphere, Bataille studied the sacred in
terms of the rituals typical of French villages: “Bataille’s most sus-
tained illustration of the sacred as a transformative process leads to
the antipodes of the exotic, since he refers the reader to the cemetery
behind the church located at the heart of every typical French village.
The entire complex comprised of building and burial ground forms
the essential ‘kernel’ necessary for the transformative process of the
negative forces unleashed by the proximity of death into the sacred
‘right’ of religious order and consecration” (Richman, “Sacred” 71).
Like Bataille, Dalí refocuses the ethnographic gaze on buildings typi-
cal of his own Catalonian culture, built around the time of his birth.20
Modern Style derives its power from the visceral reaction it pro-
vokes, not unlike a successful surrealist object. As in a Dogon ritual,
one impression — that a mask is inanimate, for instance — is trans-
formed into its opposite, the uncanny sense when it is worn during
a dance that the mask is alive and suddenly capable of revealing
supernatural powers. For Dalí the moment of looking and experi-
encing those reversals is a sacred moment of mixed exaltation and
fear in which disgust hovers like a ghost over the ecstasy prompted
by Gaudí’s baroque excesses. Seeing examples of Modern Style is
mesmerizing; he loses himself in its contemplation. It is as absorbing
as a ritual, akin to surrealist automatism or the Dogon dance — in
other words, a ritual to which our response is unconscious and re-
pressed. For Modern Style elicits a sense of double vision from the
viewer, who, during a momentary revelation, suddenly sees his or
her own desire and repulsion magically projected onto an external
object. The impact of this anamorphic double vision characteristic of
surrealist ghostliness is so powerful — as Dalí’s multiple superlatives
indicate — that viewers like himself internalize the objects seen and,
in fantasy, accomplish the desire to ingest them.21
Ethnographic Thinking, Ecstatic Looking

In a parodic gesture that is also serious, Dalí copies the ethnographic
model for observing foreign cultures and in the manner of an eth-

nographic surrealist applies it to works from his own culture in the
“Modern Style Architecture” essay. In place of the ghosts or “spirits”
of spiritualism he evokes other worlds within his living, geographi-
cal world and casts a scientific eye on them. And he goes a step
further by inviting his reader to become the object of ethnographic
study, the “native” from a foreign culture, called on to interact with
familiar monuments, but now in a sacred way, not unlike that of
the Dogon dancer in the midst of a ritual. Dalí moves from ethno-
graphic observation and description to interaction with the object
described — an interaction that is so complete he becomes one with
it. In this way he was anticipating the Ratton Gallery exhibition, as
Janine Mileaf explains, in which the surrealists “attempted to present
tribal objects as interactive, ritualized entities,” which gave them a
parallel function to surrealist objects and also signaled the transition
of non-Western objects from the ethnographic museum to the art
gallery (“Body” 252).
For the Dogon dancer, transported into another world during the
ritual dance, Brassaï and Dalí substitute the “mask” of the camera,
which similarly offers glimpses of an alternative ghostly world. The
transformative moment takes place when Brassaï focuses on Invol-
untary Sculptures and magnifies them. Suddenly, through his camera
lens, they look almost animate, even animal.22 Brassaï does with
photography what Artaud claims for the cinema: “Due to the fact
that it isolates objects, it endows them with a second life” (“Sorcery”
103). In Brassaï’s photographs disposable things are momentarily
activated the way Dogon masks are activated during the dance.
When Dalí looks at everyday objects from his own culture — the
buildings his Catalonian compatriots see every day while walking
to work — he invites his readers to see them anew as extraordinary,
to see, through and with him, into his own extravagant and private
interior world. For Dalí, as for Ray, looking is like dancing, just as
looking through the magnified lens is also something like ritual
dancing for Brassaï. Dalí makes clear that not only is the thing looked
at activated, as are Ray’s pins and tacks, but the looker is similarly

activated, the way Benjamin described the collector being energized
by touching the objects in his collection. Dalí interiorizes what he
sees, filtering it through his consciousness so that marvels, once
seen, live on as ghosts within him. He loses himself in the ecstatic
contemplation of Modern Style, seeing it so intimately that it exerts
a psychosexual pull on him as a living being might. Like the Dogon
mask and Brassaï’s detritus, this psychic version of the desired object
is discarded after consumption. For Dalí, his internalized subjective
version of Art Nouveau is more real than the actual buildings and
sculptures that survive intact the encounter with his gaze.
This transformative looking, like wearing a mask or looking
through a camera lens, accords completely with how Dalí imagines
the early period of surrealist experiments (in which he did not par-
ticipate): “All night long a few surrealists would gather round the
big table used for experiments, their eyes protected and masked by
thin though opaque mechanical slats,” after spending time in the
streets of Paris at night, “where the most beautiful and hallucinat-
ing iron vegetation sprouts those electric blooms still decorating in
the ‘Modern Style’ the entrance of the Paris Métro” (“Object” 88).
Dalí imagined that the first surrealists had internalized his beloved
Modern Style sculptures on their way to Breton’s apartment to par-
ticipate in trance utterings and automatic poems. And he imagined
the trances themselves to be like the ecstatic dancing he evokes in
his essay — again, a surrealist, experiential form of primitivism.23
The Dogon dancer before the dance, Brassaï before the photo-
graphic session, and Dalí before taking a second look at Gaudí’s
buildings and Guimard’s sculptures, all have critical distance on
these objects, a moment of suspension before entering into a sacred,
ritualized relationship in which all distance collapses. This suspended
distance is then recorded by photography and reproduced in se-
quential issues of Minotaure.24 In all three cases a magical moment
is captured on film, allowing readers the thrill of double vision, of
seeing an ordinary object become extraordinary when taken out of
context. In parallel, Dalí examines Modern Style like an ethnographic

surrealist, by making the familiar strange in a gesture of cultural lev-
eling whereby he calls attention to what Europeans tend to overlook
on the way to the metro, whether in Barcelona or Paris (Collected
121). He embraces an ethnographic approach to European culture by
exoticizing the everyday. And yet he also questions the viability of
such an approach by vaporizing the distance supposedly maintained
by ethnographers; through his entrance into an intimate relation with
his object of study he internalizes and consumes it.25 His essay pres-
ents “ethnographic evidence” while at the same time self-consciously
connecting directly, even ecstatically, with this evidence.
Whereas French sociologists aimed to “de-fetishize” their objects
of study, according to Richman, Dalí sought to hyperfetishize his
so that the object in question would literally plunge the owner into
a transformative rite (“Sacred” 68). He purposely moves from the
distancing of ethnographic description to an immediate experience
of strangeness. It is this focus on experience together with the trig-
gering of double vision that makes this work of Dalí’s emblematic of
surrealist ghostliness. His attitude inherently questions whether the
ethnographic observer can ever maintain objectivity, whether true
ethnographic distance exists.26 Right in the middle of Paris and in his
even more familiar urban Barcelona, Dalí “went native” and cleverly
and self-consciously invited his readers to do the same, implying
that what we can learn from observing distant cultures, we can also
learn from observing our own and our own psychosexual interac-
tions with that culture; we are all natives of some place. Blending
the surrealist sciences of psychoanalysis and ethnography visually
through surrealist ghostliness,27 Dalí’s persistent view that everything
around him has as much liveliness as he himself exemplifies surreal-
ist ghostliness and corroborates Freud’s belief that modern Western
human beings, particularly modern neurotics, contain within them
traces of a belief in animism (Totem 75). This questioning of how
and what we see as human beings was certainly typical of surrealism,
particularly of those surrealists who, like Dalí and Brassaï and also
Lee Miller, were sensitive to ghostliness.

4 The Ghostliness in Lee Miller’s
Egyptian Landscapes
I know how it feels to be a photographer and it’s hell. . . .

Until Xmas time this year I hadn’t taken even a roll of
film — about three exposures I didn’t bother to develop. . . .
I’ve found a small shop to do my developing and printing
to my satisfaction, so I’m taking an interest again.
Lee Miller, letter to her brother Erik, Cairo, 1935
Lee Miller’s photography captures the ghost images of human bodies

that emerge as visual puns in the paradoxically empty landscapes
she shot in Egypt in the mid-1930s, creating photographs that em-
phasize her medium’s generic tendency to refer to mortality and
time. These photographs elaborate a psychic geography that genders
surrealist ghostliness and reflects a deepening of Miller’s surrealist
photographic perspective, developed during her years in Paris start-
ing in 1929, when, at twenty-two, she initiated an apprenticeship to
and personal relationship with Man Ray, with whom she enjoyed a
lively “visual conversation” (Lyford 230).
Miller’s Human Head

Inspired by Claude Cahun, Miller and Ray both photographed Mill-
er’s friend Tanja Ramm’s head in a bell jar in the summer of 1930
(Penrose, “A Thing” 59).1 Their working relationship was very close
during the three years they spent together, as Miller’s son, Antony
91
14. Lee Miller, Tanja Ramm
and the Belljar, Variant
on Hommage à D. A. F.
de Sade (ca. 1930). © Lee
Miller Archives, England
2011. All rights reserved.
www.leemiller.co.uk.
Penrose, explains: “A measure of Lee’s and Man Ray’s mutual respect

was that neither of them was seriously concerned when their credits
were wrongly ascribed” (Lives 30). For example, when Miller flashed
on a light in the darkroom after a mouse ran over her foot, she ac-
cidentally reinvented solarization — an eerie halo around a subject’s
head that they both used subsequently and that became a hallmark
of Ray’s portraits (30).2
The bell jar photograph attributed to Miller was published in Jane
Livingston’s Lee Miller, Photographer fifty-nine years after Ray’s pub-
lication of Hommage à D. A. F. de Sade in Le surréalisme au service
de la révolution (see fig. 14). As in Ray’s version, the eyes are closed.
What Miller shares with Cahun is a visible consciousness of gender
in her exploration of the human and a clear desire to show that the
human as a category is gendered female to the same degree that it
is gendered male. Whereas Ray’s photograph shows a woman in the
throes of a sexualized limit experience captured from a distinctly
masculine perspective, Miller’s photograph, like Cahun’s, is of a
human being who happens to be a woman. To be a woman is not
92 Lee Miller’s Egyptian Landscapes

an exception to the masculine norm of humanity, claim Cahun and
Miller with their photographs, in recognition of the fact that work
by their male contemporaries, including Ray, tended to assume that
the norm was invariably masculine, to which women served as an
alternative if not an exception. The sexuality of the head in a bell jar
in Miller’s photograph is not featured or presented for viewing. Nor
is it powerless for being dead, as in Ray’s photograph. Miller’s head
floats in a state of suspension, as a dreaming being. Like a ghost this
head appears to have access to both the world of the living and of
the dead.
Ramm’s head in Miller’s version arouses less empathy than Cahun’s
because the eyes are closed and there is not the same awareness of
mindful consciousness. The head is as thoroughly cut off from reason
in Miller’s version as in Ray’s. There are, however, subtle differences
between Miller’s and Ray’s take on the idea of a woman’s head in a bell
jar. First, as in Cahun’s version, Ramm’s face in Miller’s photograph
is seen head-on. This angle engages a more direct interaction with
the viewer than in Ray’s version. Second, in Miller’s shot Ramm’s
head has no black ribbon over the eyes, and the shadow, which
falls diagonally in Ray’s version, has been greatly diminished and
looks far less like a mask, considering Miller’s shift in angle.3 The
removal of the ribbon, the lightening of the shadow, and the more
direct confrontation with the head itself, together with the omission
of the photograph’s title (its respectful reference to Sade) and the
identifying signature of a male photographer (Man Ray), make of
Miller’s photograph an image that challenges reason in a gentler,
less erotic and gender-specific way.
Through the presence of the binding ribbon and the shadow,
the masking of the head in Ray’s photograph eroticizes the image.4
Although there is a similar ambiguity about the facial expression
in both Ray’s and Miller’s versions, in the latter case, Ramm’s head
seems less identified with a sadistic, nightmarish scenario involv-
ing binding, twisting, and masking. Face to face with this head,
and without the signs of difference and distance symbolized by the
Lee Miller’s Egyptian Landscapes 93

15. Lee Miller, Under the Belljar (ca. 1930).
© Lee Miller Archives, England 2011. All
rights reserved. www.leemiller.co.uk.
black ribbon and the dark shadow, the viewer is invited to see the
signs of an alternative to death: that state of unconsciousness typi-
cal of sleep.5 Thus Miller’s version, because of its ambiguity about
the head’s liveliness, has a more anamorphic quality than Ray’s. It
becomes a dead thing while incongruously existing as a sleeping
human, as though a severed head could retain consciousness, as in
Cahun’s photographs.
Miller made two other documents related to this photograph
that focus with humor on the liveliness and humanity of the human
head. The first is a sketch she probably produced around the time
she made the photograph, Under the Belljar (ca. 1930; see fig. 15). It
is as minimalist as a fashion drawing and depicts a head in a bell jar
that rests on a kitchen table. The head in the sketch is more defini-
tively alive than Ramm’s head in Miller’s photograph, even though
the eyes are similarly closed. The head’s liveliness is conveyed by its
erect posture and the demure bend of its neck. The hair, swept up
and decorated with flowers, looks as though it had been styled for a
formal occasion, such as a wedding. Toying with the idea of the bell
jar as a place to store a bridal headdress, Miller humorously places
the flowered crown along with the bride’s head under the globe. The
drawing’s emphasis on a living head seen beside Miller’s version of

the bell jar photograph corroborates the sense that her photographed
head is incongruously and serenely floating or dreaming rather than
irretrievably immobilized; instead of having given up the ghost it
is drifting as peacefully as a ghost — not an actual ghost, only like
one, with ghostliness here presented as a metaphor and not a grim
reality.
The second document related to Miller’s bell jar photograph is
her essay “The Human Head,” published over twenty years later in
Vogue magazine (1953). This essay, written in conjunction with the
Institute of Contemporary Arts show The Wonder and Horror of the
Human Head, meditates on changing ideals of beauty over time and
the various ways women have “used their heads,” specifically the brain
matter inside, to maintain and disguise their outward appearance.6
Although clearly female in the essay, the head in question is first
and foremost human, as the title insists, an object of admiration or
judgment for others but primarily, for Miller, an object “we wouldn’t
exchange,” as she states in her conclusion (170). Similarly Ramm’s
head strikes the viewer as human as well, over and above her status
as a woman. It is in its humanity that Ramm’s head stimulates a
meditation in the viewer on his or her own mortality because the
image is haunted by more than what is visually inscribed within it;
it suggests that human experience combines the inexplicable ghostly
with our rational appreciation of our situation in the world.
The Ghostliness of Miller’s Visual Puns

Miller’s Paris photographs, her most explicitly surrealist work, rep-
resent the first aspect of her photographic style: modernist elegance
informed by humor and a symmetry of forms — both natural and
man-made — with a frequent focus on chance juxtapositions of bod-
ies and objects. Exploding Hand (ca. 1930), which snaps a woman’s
fingers at the instant she reaches for the handle on a Paris café’s glass
door, embodies the punning doubleness of surrealist ghostliness,
wherein two images coexist and remind the viewer of the coexis-
tence of realities (see fig. 16). Shot from the other side of the door,

through the scratches left by all those who have previously grasped
the handle, the hand looks as though it were giving off sparks, as
though it were exploding in the manner of a surrealist pun, where
the distance between what you see or hear and what you think you
have seen or heard sparks a moment of recognition, even laughter.
As with Desnos’s automatic poems, where the listener needs to
wait a beat before the joke is registered, we realize that, despite the
title, the hand in Miller’s photograph is not exploding. As we look
again in an attempt to understand the relation between the image
and the title, we laugh when we understand retrospectively why we
thought we saw an explosion; we are caught by Miller’s joke, which
points us away from what we have actually seen and toward what
we think we see.7 Her emphasis on the way photography leads us
deep into imaginary territory, far away from the reality it purports
to present, shows her implicit stake in the doubleness of surrealist
ghostliness.
Her surrealist photographs reveal Miller’s genius for framing
and catching unguarded moments, unexpected angles. She presents
surprising examples of the marvelous in everyday life as though
they were ordinary events occurring anywhere, at any time, for the
alert observer to ponder, like an ethnographer seeking a culture’s
16. Lee Miller,

Exploding Hand
(ca. 1930).
© Lee Miller
Archives,
England 2011.
All rights
reserved. www
.leemiller.co.uk.

17. Lee Miller, Nude Bent
Forward (ca. 1930). © Lee
identifying characteristics. It is sufficient, as Breton declared in the

“Manifesto,” to be receptive and open to such moments of possible
(subliminal) revelation, to walk down the street guided only by
chance.8
Another example of Miller’s surrealist ghostliness may be found
in her visually punning Nude Bent Forward (ca. 1930; see fig. 17).9
Initially the viewer sees an ordinary image: a human being bent over,
possibly stretching or reaching for something on the ground. We see
the back and notice the skin’s sensuality, so precisely captured that
one can imagine touching it. But on second glance, we realize that
she has also registered a kind of Dalinian double image, a visually
anamorphic pun based on the body. It is almost impossible to tell
initially whether we see this bent back stretched in a way that places
the bowed neck at the top of the image, or whether the torso has
taken a deeper bend, situating the curved buttocks at the top.
Miller has framed and cropped this image in a way that defamil-
iarizes it. For an instant we have no idea what we are seeing, and the
nude body suddenly is uncannily alien and strange. Forced to think

about human anatomy, we realize that this body is bending deeply
and that it is anamorphically inverted: seen bottom up, head down.
Furthermore there is no way to be certain at first of this nude’s sexual
identity, except for the fact that the nudity, at first take, genders it
feminine. Not unlike Ramm’s head in the bell jar photograph, this
nude is more human than gendered. Again the doubleness of this
image transforms it into an example of surrealist ghostliness — the
visual insistence on simultaneously coexisting realities that provokes
the viewer to explore human experience more imaginatively and to
free ourselves from preconceptions established by the dominant
culture. Miller’s fascination with double images would translate into
her most haunting work: her Egyptian photographs.
Miller’s return to New York City to set up a studio with her brother
Erik coincided with her first one-woman show, mounted in 1932–33
by Julien Levy, whose New York gallery was a well-known venue
for surrealism at a time when surrealist photography was enjoying
enhanced visibility in Paris thanks to Minotaure. Following this suc-
cess, however, she gave up photography temporarily, when she moved
from New York to Egypt on her marriage to Aziz Eloui Bey in 1934.
When she returned to photography, her deployment of surrealist
ghostliness in the shape of anamorphic visual puns became more
sophisticated as she teased out even more deeply hidden elements
within otherwise familiar and trivial forms.
Miller’s Egyptian Style

In their assured stillness, Miller’s Egyptian landscapes announce the
beginning of her mature work. They represent the stylistic synthesis
of her earlier photographs, taken as a surrealist working with Ray in
Paris, and of those taken as the director of her own studio in New
York. Her visual investigation of the symmetry of form lent her style
“precision” and “reserve,” as her biographer Carolyn Burke states;
the work is also modernist in its exploration of abstraction (A Life
134). The honesty she appreciated in her friend Edward Murrow’s
broadcasting style during World War II could also be attributed to

her own work (218). She had an aptitude for isolating moments, as
Livingston points out, for finding “in the ordinary its own quality
of strangeness or contortion” (35). Miller’s photographs of Egyptian
landscapes synthesize her skill at representing isolated moments, like
her apparently spontaneous shots taken in Paris, while at the same
time communicating the intense focus of the portraits that were her
specialty in New York. In fact her vision of uninhabited landscapes
gives them a strangely inhabited, oddly human look. Although these
images seem natural and “unforced,” to use Livingston’s term, like
her previous work they reveal her meticulous approach to establish-
ing each shot (35).
Miller’s spontaneity and staging together create photographs that
paradoxically seem almost to have taken themselves, as if the in-
animate photographed thing had acquired sentience as a result of
the (al)chemical magic inherent in the photographic process and
participated in the creation of its own ghost by creating its own im-
age.10 Miller similarly appears to efface herself from the process of
creation while at the same time presenting a composition that seems
incongruously posed, as though the images presented a sentient
person rather than a space devoid of human beings. Like Brassaï
she locates sentience where there ought to be none; she responds to
landscapes the way he responded to objects. Her Egyptian photo-
graphs ultimately show the ghostly traces of the photographer’s own
gaze, activating shapes and spaces and leaving only the ghost of her
photographic intervention behind. These photographs reveal what
Whitney Chadwick has called Miller’s “feeling for the disquieting
image” (Women 161).
One critical way Miller succeeds in humanizing the photographs
of uninhabited spaces she shot in Egypt involves her invocation of
the sense of touch. The tendency of photography to conjoin “touch
and sight,” as Geoffrey Batchen insists, comes to the fore in the
way Miller accentuates her landscapes’ touchable qualities (Each
61). Her early training in viewing photographic images through a
stereoscope made her very aware of the three-dimensional feeling

of being physically enveloped by an image. Burke explains Miller’s
father’s preference for the stereoscope, “which took a pair of pictures
set slightly apart so that the two images formed one when seen
through a viewer. . . . The technique produced an illusion of depth
and a sharpness of detail that gave the impression of being inside
the scene” (“Framing” 127–28). Furthermore it is likely that she saw
the popular stereoscopic views of Egypt photographed by Frances
Frith, which were also published as flat images in Art Journal and
were available by subscription in the nineteenth century (Nickel
68, 74–75). Miller’s photographs often give such an impression of
being enveloped by the image because of the way her angles col-
lapse distance, emphasize textures, and eliminate the horizon. The
resulting proximity contributes to the arresting quality of her work
and contrasts with her modernist experimentation with abstraction
from her Paris years.
Five Takes on Miller’s Surrealist Egypt

Miller began photographing Egypt as a way to get to know it, out of
a “desire to comprehend her husband’s country” (Burke, A Life 150).
Her images communicate the experience of foreignness while assert-
ing a growing familiarity. Shortly after her interest in photography
was rekindled she traveled to a group of monasteries situated at Wadi
Natrun, just west of the Nile Delta between Cairo and Alexandria,
some of the earliest Christian monasteries in the world. Miller ex-
plains in a letter to her brother that she had only just started taking
pictures at Christmas that year, before which she had taken only
“about three exposures [she] didn’t bother to develop.” She continues,
“[But then I went with] a very nice American boy who is here to
organise the new Kodachrome processing plant for the Middle East
. . . to a village to take some pictures [and] found a small shop to do
my developing and printing to my satisfaction” (in Penrose, Lives 65).
Domes of the Church of the Virgin (al Adhra), Deir el Soriano Mon-
astery (ca. 1936), a photograph she took at Wadi Natrun, immediately
gives the viewer a sense of proximity to the scene partly because of

18. Lee Miller, Domes
of the Church of the
Virgin (al Adhra), Deir
el Soriano Monastery
(ca. 1936). © Lee Miller
Archives, England
2011. All rights
reserved.
the highly contrasted play of light and shadow (see fig. 18). The shot
shows the roof of a fourth-century Coptic monastery. Even though
horizontal wisps of cloud are parallel to the edge of the monastery’s
invisible façade and with a low wall in the lower right-hand corner of
the photograph, the camera is nevertheless close to the twin domes.
The curve of the dome dominating the left foreground is doubled by
its own shadow, cast against an equally curved second dome to its
right; a bell tower stands off to one side. All of these angles, shadows,
and curves lead the eye diagonally upward from lower left to upper
right, resting finally on the small dome on top of the bell tower. We
get no orienting perspective of the building as we might in a postcard
or a tourist’s snapshot. Instead the view of the plump, hand-patted
domes, “more sensuous than breasts,” as Penrose describes them,
with the bell tower dome beyond, transforms this ancient building
into a female form, a body that attempts to look at the full length of
its own prone torso (Lives 81).
In the instant we apprehend the ghostly female form within the
ostensibly empty landscape, Miller’s sly photograph suddenly takes
on the dimension of a surrealist object, typically diverted from its

original function, like Duchamp’s Bottlerack, no longer useful for dry-
ing bottles once it was displayed as art. A monastery’s architectural
structure anamorphically shifts with a change in perspective into a
reclining nude. Moreover it is this ancient building’s clearly hand-
made quality that promotes the spectral sense that hidden within it
is the ghost of a human body: not only in the shape of female forms
but as the traces of fingers and hands. This ghostly effect is reinforced
by the shadows, in particular by the central dome’s shadow, which
enhances its three-dimensionality. This shadow serves, moreover,
as a reminder that the photograph itself is a shadow of the moment
photographed, that it too is in indexical relation to the time and
place photographically presented. This ghostly nude discovered in
the photograph of a place where for centuries no women lived strikes
the viewer first as a mistake, then as a joke; once it is seen, the image
cannot be suppressed or effaced from the mind. Like a persistent
revenant captured in nineteenth-century spirit photography, the
building evokes its alter identity, which Miller’s photograph tantaliz-
ingly suggests: the present-absent ghost image of a nude.
Domes of the Church of the Virgin records Miller’s fascination with
forms — visible in the modernist play of curves and straight lines
present in her idiosyncratic perspective — and also displays her wit,
evident in her evocation of a woman’s body in an architectural space
that excluded women. It also evokes her personal memory: through
its stereoscopic effect, one feels almost surrounded by the image, as
Burke remarks apropos of Miller’s Egyptian photographs in general:
“It may have seemed that she was now photographing scenes she had
studied through her father’s stereoscope viewer” (“Framing” 130). If
in seeing Egypt she was seeing it partially through her memory of
having seen its monuments within her father’s stereoscope, then it
is not surprising that her images would seek to re-create a similar
intimacy enveloping the viewer in the image.
A photograph from the following year, The Procession (Bird Tracks
in the Sand) (ca. 1937; sometimes referred to as Sand Tracks, Red
Sea), resembles the monastery photograph insofar as its shadowed

19. Lee Miller, The
Procession (Bird Tracks
in the Sand) (ca. 1937).
© Lee Miller Archives,
England 2011. All rights
reserved.
contrasts stand out more starkly because of the lack of any sign of
human presence or habitation (see fig. 19). The parallel ridges of
sand left behind by the receding sea reveal the remains of the tide’s
push and pull separating land from sea. The “tracks” of the title oc-
cupy the entire image from top to bottom; there is no horizon, no
contextual landscape to orient the viewer. Almost abstract in their
idiosyncratic evenness, the wavering lines seem to lead to infinity.
The footprints of gulls mingle with blotches here and there that be-
tray the former presence of marine creatures, further breaking the
steady progression of the tracks. Their quavering dance resembles
the nervous tracery of an electrocardiogram, a seismograph, or a
vertical polygraph. This top-to-bottom orientation underscores the
title “tracks,” for these rounded, slightly curvilinear paths in the sand
give off an air of sentient energy.
The verticality of these alternating curves and indentations makes
them look as if they are standing up, pulling upward as well as out-
ward and capable of dragging the viewer beyond the upper border.
They seem alive, or recently alive. They sway and turn as they appear

to rush into the distance beyond the top of the frame; their plunging
edges resemble writing. It seems that a reorientation of the photo-
graph, a rotation to the right, would make the writing legible. The
strong sense of life forms that have just departed the scene evokes
the reality of an absence of something having been there once, a
description, as Derrida explains, of the very nature of photography
in general, particularly of the photogram: “Although it is no longer
there (present, living, real, etc.), its having-been-there [is] now part
of the referential or intentional structure of my relationship to the
photogramme[;] the return of the referent indeed takes the form of
a haunting. This is a ‘return of the dead,’ whose spectral arrival in
the very space of the photogramme well resembles an emission or
emanation” (“Deaths” 281–82). Derrida’s use of the term photogram
emphasizes that a photograph is the result of light written onto film.
In this sense photography, and Miller’s photograph in particular, ful-
fill Rosalind Krauss’s understanding of Bretonian “convulsive beauty.”
“Surreality,” Krauss insists, “is, we could say, nature convulsed into a
kind of writing. The special access that photography, as a medium,
has to this experience is photography’s privileged connection to the
real” (“Photography” 35).
The Procession, then, like Domes of the Church of the Virgin, is
not merely a “transparent, descriptive, [and] strangely unevent-
ful” document, which is how Livingston describes Miller’s Egyptian
photographs. On the contrary, it is a self-referential work that goes
beyond the documentary in the manner of the surrealist counter-
archival impulse (to use John Roberts’s term): making archives of
odd, unexpected categories of images like Cahun’s intimate series of
self-portraits and Brassaï’s Involuntary Sculptures (48). The Procession
is self-consciously haunted both by latent shapes and by paradoxical
suggestions of the passage of time, even as it highlights the way pho-
tography itself causes time to stand still in the manner of Derrida’s
archive, an oscillating figure caught between the desire to stop time
and the inevitability of time’s progress. These tracks convey sensual-
ity. The sand in The Procession looks almost folded, like sheets on an

unmade bed, as though the traces on the sand had been left by hu-
man bodies instead of birds or marine organisms trembling through
water. Those recently present birds and invertebrates stand in for
humans, leaving behind the ghostly sense of a bodily presence. It
is the photographer’s own body, after all, that makes it possible for
our bodies to see in this deserted yet strangely intimate scene the
ghost of physical beings. Her retrospective presence enhances the
ghostliness of this image.
A later photograph, The Cloud Factory (Sacks of Cotton) (1939;
identified by Livingston with the anthropomorphic title Cotton Strug-
gling to Escape from Sacks to Become Clouds [1936]), was probably
taken at the cotton farm of a family known to Miller’s husband (in
Penrose, Lives 60; see fig. 20). In the image of cotton enclosed in sacks
but also appearing to escape its burlap confines the photograph plays
on “the themes of confinement and transcendence,” which Burke
ascribes in general to Miller’s Egyptian work (“Framing” 130). It
highlights the similarity between the escaping cotton and the fluffy
clouds in the sky with which it harmonizes. Miller anthropomor-
phizes the burlap bags by shooting them up close and highlighting
20. Lee Miller, The

Cloud Factory (Sacks of
Cotton) (1939).
© Lee Miller Archives,
England 2011. All rights
reserved.

their comical resemblance to a human body, as if the latter were
spilling out of an overly tight dress.11 As with The Procession, there is
not a single visible trace of humans, and yet here the objects framed
by Miller’s lens double for humans and appear to reveal the ghost
of the human: first in the shape of the sacks and then in the hands
that wove the sacks and packed them with cotton.
The sacks, uneven and handmade like the patted domes of Domes
of the Church of the Virgin, remind the viewer that this photograph
was also handmade, produced by a body. Looking something like
wooly, curly hair, the escaping cotton is poised to spring upward
from the dark lower left-hand corner. These bouncy sacks evoke the
restlessness Miller herself experienced during those years, when,
as Penrose writes, “boredom was starting to creep into Lee’s life,
like an enemy infiltrator” (Lives 66). Through its diagonal impulse
from lower left to upper right, again as in Domes of the Church of
the Virgin, The Cloud Factory conveys a feeling of imprisonment, of
pent-up energy, a longing to break free, to lift away from the dark
corner of earth and ascend toward the speeding wisps of cloud above.
It pictures, literally, a struggle.
At first glance, one might see traces of a traditionally colonial-
ist, orientalizing gaze in this detection by a white Western woman
of the ghosts of female bodies in the Egyptian landscape. Such a
colonialist perspective feminizes and exoticizes the body out of a
desire to possess and conquer. “The Orient was routinely described
as feminine,” Edward Said tells us, “its riches as fertile, its main
symbols the sensual woman, the harem” (103). Was Miller uncon-
sciously projecting her own culture’s patriarchal views onto this
foreign landscape? The answer to this question probably should
be yes, if only because of the inevitability of Miller’s awareness of
previous traditions of Westerners photographing Egypt, including
Firth’s stereoscopic images. As Douglas Nickel points out, those
earlier photographs follow the orientalist structure of mediation
between the real and the imaginary, allowing the Western viewer
a chance to experience his or her “touring experience as a search

for a secret or lost past hidden within an unstable and refractory
present” (147). Miller’s use of hidden images certainly bespeaks the
orientalist expectation that these landscapes might hold secrets.
Was she seeing the ghost of the colonialist and touristic images
of Egypt she had first perceived through her father’s stereoscope,
reanimating it through an ethnographic gaze in these photographs
as a powerful visual metaphor for a lost and mythical motherland?
In her study of “race, gender and sexuality in the colonial contest,”
Anne McClintock recalls Columbus’s initial comparison of the first
Caribbean island he laid eyes on to a woman’s breast: the island fea-
tured “a protuberance upon its summit in the unmistakable shape
of a nipple — toward which he was slowly sailing” (21). “Explorers
called unknown lands ‘virgin’ territory,” McClintock continues. “In
myriad ways, women served as mediating and threshold figures
by means of which men oriented themselves in space, as agents of
power and agents of knowledge” (24).
However, a second glance at the perspective on latent female bod-
ies within these two images problematizes any initial impression of
Miller’s possible reinscription of an orientalizing gaze, even if the
structure of hidden images might seem to reinforce it. For if one can
see breasts in Domes of the Church of the Virgin, it is as a woman who
does the looking, raising her head to look down the length of her
own body. Insofar as the bell tower can be seen as phallic, it is off to
the side, more a symbol of admiration for than a possession of the
foregrounded breasts. Similarly the bursting clothing suggested by
the sacks in Cloud Factory evokes the feeling of being confined within
such a garment oneself. In both images the subjectivity invoked is that
of a sympathetic woman celebrating her own body, her own desires.
Anatomy here is not presented to the gaze of a controlling master
but rather expresses the pleasure of shared feminine experience.12
As recent work by Gérard Gasarian and Georgiana Colvile has
pointed out, in Mad Love Breton equates clouds with desire: “Desire,
the only motive of the world, desire, the only rigor humans must be
acquainted with, where could I be better situated to adore it than on

the inside of the cloud. The form that clouds take, as they are seen
from the ground, are in no way random; they are, rather augural”
(88).13 For Breton, clouds play a role in his pursuit of the woman he
desires sexually because they allow him to imagine his pursuit as a
game of “hide and seek with ghosts” (89). Miller, on the other hand,
uses clouds to evoke the sexual self-confidence of a woman; the “hide
and seek” in this photograph involves only the double reading of the
image that the clouds allow. What better example could there be of
a woman surrealist’s expression of her own desire for freedom than
this photograph and, as we shall see, Portrait of Space? The cotton
in the sacks clearly reaches up toward the freedom of the clouds as
clouds. It is thanks to their resemblance to the cotton struggling to
escape as well as their freedom of movement that Miller conveys
the possibility that a woman’s desire to escape her clothing in a mo-
ment of freedom from all confinement might be a vision buried in
a photograph of burlap bags bursting with cotton on a cloudy day.
In Miller’s hands, these bags of cotton conjure a latent feminine
presence, as do the remaining two photographs I will treat here as
exemplary of Miller’s look at Egypt through the prism of surrealist
ghostliness: Portrait of Space and From the Top of the Great Pyramid.
These two images present the vision of a specific, self-conscious
photographer, who happened to be a woman. Miller’s gendering of
surrealist ghostliness in the long run comes as much from her inser-
tion of the awareness of the body into the experience of ghostliness
as from her feminizing of it. Like Cahun, Miller’s commentary is
about human experience over and above feminine experience. When
women decide to put the body back into such an experience, this
decision comes from two sources: the desire to reinsert what had
been excluded and the desire to explore embodiment for its own sake
as what is crucial to human experience and, even more specifically,
to the surrealist experience arising out of automatism, an experience
always fundamentally ghostly in mind and in body.
By comparison to The Cloud Factory, which has traces of human
hands and an anthropomorphic title, although it shows no visible

21. Lee Miller, Portrait
of Space (1937). © Lee
trace of human presence, Miller’s well-known Portrait of Space from

1937 reveals definite evidence of recent human presence because of
the more obvious presentation of man-made things (see fig. 21).
A mosquito-net screen dominates the photograph, reminding the
viewer that everything seen through a photographic lens is indeed
“screened.” With her characteristic skill with cropping and fram-
ing, Miller creates the illusion that the viewer is looking out onto
the desert from inside a screened tent with the sand immediately
accessible beyond it.14 The screen is torn, and the close-up angle
allows the viewer to imagine that a person could have just passed
through it directly into the desert landscape beyond. A tilted frame
hangs incongruously in the center of the image; its rectangular shape
rhymes with the diamond shape of the torn screen lying below. Poised
in the upper center of the photograph and even more transparent
than the screen, this empty frame refers again to the photographic
lens, for it doubles the camera’s aperture and focuses the viewer’s
gaze out onto the desert sky.
The empty frame also evokes the ghostly presence of the photog-

rapher, placing viewers within the tent looking outward with the
photographer and simultaneously positioning us to look inward
because of the frame’s resemblance to a mirror, which here becomes a
metaphor for self-reflection. The frame positions us where a head and
eye might be located, enhancing the misshapen “body” of the screen’s
flapping fabric and focusing our gaze outward toward the desert, as
if the gaze were coming from the body of the photographer herself
and the screen were her outer skin. The “portrait” of the title further
personifies the tent-body; it emphasizes how this body experiences
inner space in harmony with a vast outer space. Furthermore the
empty frame resembles the “unsilvered glass” of Breton and Soup-
ault’s Magnetic Fields that metaphorically divides a body’s psychic
unconscious from consciousness, separating outer from innermost
realities. We see the sky — the space of the title — first only through
the screen; it takes the frame to readjust our perspective and clarify
how that space is inner as well, that we are seeing both a reflection
and a projection. We need only make a shift in perception to see
the inner and outer realities as reflections of each other through a
ghostly and anamorphic double awareness of coexisting inner and
outer realities: the sense of spaciousness within the tent serves as a
confirmation and reflection of the vast spaciousness evident in the
desert, outside of the tent.
Looking outward from Miller’s imaginary tent, following the
tent-body’s gaze, and imagining that a living human body has just
departed the tent through the torn screen and entered the desert,
the gaze is led to the road that crosses the photograph diagonally
from lower left to mid-right and that bisects the diamond shape of
the torn screen roughly at its midpoint. The road stands as a mute
indicator of an escape route. More than any previous photograph,
Portrait of Space evokes the sense of the “having-been-there” that
Derrida attributes to all photography. Like the screen itself, the scene
marks that liminal moment between a human body’s recent presence
and its absence. While Miller’s understated framing suggests her own
presence, it also doubles the sense of another absent presence: that of

the person who has just left the scene through the screen, a person
who is equally invisible, equally absent from the frame yet equally
present in ghostly form. For although her photograph is empty of
human bodies, she has nonetheless seized the essence and mystery
of the body or bodies that have recently departed.
Moving in the opposite direction from the road, and at first glance
barely visible through the screen and the frame’s lower inside border,
is a cloud shaped like a giant, diaphanous bird. It is as though Miller
has succeeded in materializing the metaphorical bird imagined by
Dalí in his 1927 essay on photography when he described “a spiritual
bird” emerging from the camera lens (Collected 46). Penrose notes
that René Magritte, a close family friend, saw “this photograph in
London in 1938 and it is thought to have inspired his painting Le
Baiser,” which also presents a torn screen in a desert landscape (Lives
69). In fact the painting by Magritte that most closely resembles
Miller’s photograph was painted later, in 1951, although with the
same title. The second time he created a painting titled Le Baiser it
looked more like Miller’s photograph because it focuses on a ghostly
cloud-bird like the one in the middle of Miller’s image. The shape
of Magritte’s night bird in this later Le Baiser closely resembles the
cloud-filled bird in Le Retour (1940), painted in the same year that
Miller’s Portrait of Space was first reproduced in the London Bulletin.
Le Retour was painted just two years after the first Baiser and was
the first of several cloud-bird paintings by Magritte,15 including La
Promesse from 1950, which resembles even more closely the shape
of Miller’s cloud-bird in Portrait of Space.
This naturally surrealist creature — which looks like a real bird
and yet is only the ghost of one — underpins the overall effect of
the entire photograph: that of “a space” which, although empty of
living beings, qualifies as a “portrait” because of the powerful sense
of presence that it conveys. That we can almost see the hands that
tore the screen and passed through it comes from the pair of ana-
morphic ghostly doublings and shape-shiftings that occur within
the image: the cloud that looks like a bird and the empty frame that

looks like a mirror. This last resemblance again refers back to the
latent presence of the photographer herself, whom we cannot see
over our shoulder. It is her latent presence in the tent that helps to
draw the viewer in. “[A] sense of spaciousness opens in the body,”
writes Burke about this photograph (A Life 187). In other words,
a feeling of space “opens” viscerally within the body of the viewer
because the frame invites the viewer to look into this photograph as
into a mirror and to experience suddenly within oneself a sense of
the spaciousness parallel to the empty desert beyond the screen. That
“sense of spaciousness” indeed opens up within the viewer’s body. It
is this ability to draw the viewer into the experience represented in
the photograph that makes it so powerful. There is nothing alarm-
ing here, for in Miller’s photograph empty space conveys a dreamy,
peaceful plenitude that is crystallized by the dove-like cloud as it sails
calmly through the sky. To the extent that the torn screen could be
interpreted as a torn hymen, this image signals the photographer’s
mature ease in her own physicality, having absorbed and processed
her early history of sexual trauma.
The stillness of this portrait resembles the calm of Miller’s human
studio portraits taken in New York and the anthropomorphic qual-
ity of her other Egyptian landscape photographs — the monastery
domes that resemble breasts, the bulging sacks that look like a body,
and the textured sand tracks that evoke the languid sensuality of
rumpled sheets. That summer of 1937 Miller went back to England
and France, where she met her future husband, Roland Penrose, and
took many portraits of her friends, including the memorable Picnic
photographed at Mougins and featuring Ray and his girlfriend Ady
Fidelin, Paul and Nusch Eluard, and Penrose, which she posed as a
send-up of Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’herbe. That same year she made
one more arresting “portrait” of an ostensibly empty Egyptian land-
scape: From the Top of the Great Pyramid (ca. 1937; see fig. 22). Of
all the Egyptian photographs discussed so far, this one is the most
inhabited and yet, perhaps for this reason, seems the most empty.16
The extraordinary symmetry captured by the photograph comes

from the giant shadow of the pyramid falling in a perfect triangle
over the ruins and town below and the cultivated fields beyond. Like
The Procession, this photograph has a vertical axis. To the left of the
shadow’s apex and left of center, in the upper band of the image, lies
a T-shaped crossroad, a point to which the eyes rise. Almost imper-
ceptible at first, this crossroad crystallizes the way the entire site has
become a crossroads of different kinds of human curiosity — from
the tourist to the archaeologist to the inhabitants past and present
of the town below. The photograph expresses the degree to which
all knowledge of the history of the site is literally overshadowed by
the wonder inspired by the pyramids themselves.
The size of the shadow of this man-made monument magnifies
the viewer’s sense of its imposing shape. We do not see the pyramid
itself; we are only made to sense and feel its reflected weight through
its other, its shadow. The magnificent dimension of the pyramid
cannot be denied, while at the same time, as an object, it remains
invisible. What we see has only been touched and imprinted by it,
not unlike the photograph itself. The uncanny sense of an image
haunted palpably by the object it does not directly represent (but
22. Lee Miller, From the

Top of the Great Pyramid
(ca. 1937). © Lee Miller
Archives, England 2011.
All rights reserved.

of which it is only a shadow, a ghost) dwarfs what we actually do
see in the photograph. The haunted quality also seems to coalesce
around what appear to be two bright white edges of walls or gates
that stand out just at the pyramid’s top and seem to look back at the
viewer, like two mechanical eyes. The viewer has the sense of being
looked at. This self-consciousness directs our gaze inward at the same
time that we look outward at the landscape in the photograph. This
double sense of looking inward as well as outward is very like the
experience recorded in Portrait of Space. But whereas in Portrait of
Space the invitation to look inward calls for a serenity comparable
to that evoked by the suspended bird-cloud, here the invitation ap-
pears to be more connected to history and culture, to the human
imagination that has created such a structure as the pyramid and
the town and fields at its feet.
This simultaneously inward and outward gaze evokes Breton’s
meditation on the degree to which the surrealist sensibility encour-
ages all viewers to redirect their gaze from outward to inward. “I
believe,” states Breton in Surrealism and Painting, “that men will
long feel the need to retrace to its true source the magical river that
flows from their [own] eyes, bathing with the same light and the
same hallucinatory shadow those things that are and those things
that are not” (7). Miller’s work responds to Breton’s injunction to
be aware of the inner imagination’s power while at the same time
grounding that power in history and the world. The two dots that
resemble eyes in From the Top of the Great Pyramid make us self-
conscious about looking. The sense of being looked at by these two
small white shapes is reinforced by their location in the upper-middle
part of the image and by the way the roads in the distance spread
out from the crossroads located above the shadow’s apex. As with
the empty frame in Portrait of Space, these “eyes” are situated where
the aperture of a camera might cast its shadow or project its image,
were we to see at the summit of the pyramid’s shadow the ghostly
reflection of an old-fashioned tripod. All the lines in the photograph
come back to the pyramid’s shadow, and, as the eye is drawn again

to Miller’s apex, those strangely symmetrical eyes seem to look back,
making of this shadow another anthropomorphic presence and of
this photograph another portrait.
The shadow’s size, darkness, and weight seem, in light of Miller’s
life, to portend a heaviness of spirit, an imminent mourning, the
sadness of an impending departure. This photograph was taken
shortly before the outbreak of World War II, which Miller’s friend
Eileen Agar remembers in her memoir as “a time of uncertainty and
apprehension, dismay and despair, mixed with [the] determination
that life should be as full as possible” (143). It is not unimaginable
that its heaviness partakes of Miller’s knowledge that by moving
back to Europe she was moving closer to the war brewing there.
Since she could not take the pyramid with her, she could only hope
to take and keep its shadow: that shadow of its shadow that is the
photograph. Appropriately the photograph seems to catch the ghost
of a giant tomb, itself built to memorialize, to leave a memorable
trace of a life passed yet never forgotten. While the pyramid-tomb
itself is not visible other than as a shadow, the ancient ruins at its
feet are glimpsed within the darkest portion of the great shadow, so
that, as the eye moves up the photograph into the light at the top, the
habitations become more and more modern and, before thinning
out to roads and cultivated fields beyond, closer to the viewer’s own
historical time. No human being is visible in this photograph, and
yet the human habitation within the field of vision, from the fields to
the houses to the pyramid’s shadow, reminds the viewer of an absent
presence, crystallized in the shadow: the symbol of photography
itself and, in this case, of surrealist ghostliness.
This photograph, more than any other of Miller’s Egyptian land-
scapes considered here, suggests the temporal doubleness inherent
in surrealist ghostliness. The intense presence of photography stands
out in the way this image captures the precise moment when the
shadow is at its most powerful in casting darkness over the surround-
ing countryside and when the irretrievable pastness of photography
is intimated in the antiquity of the object that casts the shadow. This

dual presence of past and present time physically marks From the
Top of the Great Pyramid because from the base of the photograph
and moving vertically upward, time progresses from ancient ruin to
contemporary habitation. This vertical progression underscores the
temporal duality in the photograph; while time moves diachronically,
it can also stand still synchronically and in an instant, like that of an
image or the click of a shutter, give an impression of eternity. The
coexistence of a sense of mortality in conjunction with the intensity
of the present moment of lived experience allies Miller’s Egyptian
photographs to the anamorphic qualities characteristic of surreal-
ist ghostliness and its source in automatism. The sensuality of her
imagery harks back to Holbein’s Ambassadors; it juxtaposes sensual
satisfaction in life’s pleasures with the underlying yet repressed aware-
ness of the mortality that haunts and doubles lived experience.
Photographic Mementoes
From the Top of the Great Pyramid works explicitly like a memento
mori. Like Miller’s other landscapes it is devoid of people and haunts
us with an awareness of mortality lingering in a tomb’s shadow, in
which past and present converge. She uses photography in these
works to question how people and things, portraits and landscapes,
convey liveliness through paradoxical stillness and how a flash of
enveloping light resonates through a flat object. In her use of shadow
and texture she appeals to photography’s conjoining of sight and
touch. In her invocation of the photographer’s body she sensual-
izes her photographs, gendering surrealist ghostliness through the
heightened awareness of the body. She gives the viewer access to
a kind of surrealistic double vision that permits the spectator to
reflect inwardly at the same time that he or she looks outward. This
exploration of the photographic medium contributes substantially
to surrealism’s exploration of latent forces hidden within things,
to surrealism’s essential ghostliness. Ghostliness lies at the root of
Breton’s hope for surrealist painting, that it might flourish with the
privileging of an interior, imaginative model over an exterior, real-

istic one, and it underlies his admiration for the latent mysteries of
three-dimensional surrealist objects. Moreover Miller’s Egyptian
landscapes remind us that even in daylight human experience can
be dreamlike, even ghostly. Ghostliness connects her photographs
to the achievement of her friend Dorothea Tanning, whose portrait
she took in Sedona, Arizona, in 1940 and whose paintings similarly
manage to conjure a mysterious and palpable third dimension out
of two-dimensional forms.

5 Dorothea Tanning’s
Gothic Ghostliness
We are waging a desperate battle with unknown forces.

Dorothea Tanning, Between Lives
Dorothea Tanning’s work hums with an inner energy sometimes

expressed in the turning movements of dancing bodies. Even in still-
ness, the young women in her paintings contain an explosive force
that propels them beyond the frame. This hint of a ghostly and tactile
third dimension expressed in the turning blur of movement in her
two-dimensional works — her version of ghostliness — later becomes
materialized in her soft sculptures, which she began making in the
1960s. The first of these, Pelote d’épingles pouvant servir de fétiche
(henceforth Fetish), is a large velvet figure that bristles with the pins
the viewer is invited to stick into it (fig. 23). Through their sensual
softness these sculptures pull the viewer in, whereas her painted
figures whirl outward toward the viewer. The doll-like girls in her
work from the 1940s and 1950s emit what Whitney Chadwick has
called “a heightened awareness of the world and a sensitivity to the
unconscious forces that animate and transform” it (Women 138). Like
the heroine of Tanning’s gothic novel Chasm, these young women
eagerly seek knowledge about all aspects of the human, including
the increasingly embodied ghosts they discover haunting the old
houses they inhabit and reflecting back to them hidden aspects of
their own desires.
119
23. Dorothea Tanning, Pelote d’épingles pouvant servir de fétiche (1965).
© Dorothea Tanning. Tate Gallery, London.
The ghostliness of Tanning’s work stems from the reality she con-
fers on the invisible energies that press on the visible and bubble forth
from below the surface of ordinary settings such as hallways and
broom closets. Tanning’s interiors project the ghostliness typical of
the kind of late eighteenth-century gothic fiction Breton praises in
the “Manifesto,” and the transformations she shows in her painted
work are typical of the fairy tales he also singles out for praise as
preferable to the realist novels so widely admired at the beginning
of the twentieth century. They also echo the vivid awareness of a
parallel world inhabited by ghosts typical of spiritualism, surreal-
ism’s repressed ghost. Her female figures are alive with rushing in-
ner forces, just as Breton had imagined the body to be during the
automatic trance, when he compared the early surrealists to “modest
recording instruments” intent on capturing the secrets released by
the unconscious mind in group settings. For women, however, the
120 Dorothea Tanning’s Gothic Ghostliness

metaphor of the body as a nonsentient technological object requires
revision, since women have often been categorized according to
their bodily functions, as little more than nonintellectual vessels
for human reproduction. For Tanning, the female body invites rei-
magination as a forcefully whole human being, at once intellectual
and sensual, fully attuned to lived human experience and ready for
Foucault’s visualization of Bretonian automatism as a kind of “raw
and naked” possession by inner voices that lead to “the discovery
of a space that is not that of philosophy, nor of literature, nor of art,
but that of experience” (Aesthetics 173–74).
Upending the assumption typical of the American Midwest in
which she grew up, that young women belong in the home, Tanning
shows domestic space to be full of threats and temptations only
the most ingenious person can conquer. Her settings resonate with
mysterious desires materialized as body parts, flowers, or strange
hybrid animals summoned psychically by ordinary women whose
pent-up energy finds release in ghostly manifestations. Her heroines
persistently face challenges where there ought to be none, requir-
ing them to assert themselves. Life’s struggles are a universal factor
of human experience for Tanning. They begin in childhood and
persist in multiple environments, regardless of gender. A study of
Tanning’s career demonstrates how the ghostliness inherent in sur-
realism’s first productions threads through her work from start to
finish. By midcentury, when she was just hitting her stride, surrealist
ghostliness had become so established it shows up openly, no longer
reliant on anamorphic readings to reveal ghostly doubles. Tanning’s
sensuality and her move to tactile sculptures in midcareer situate
her ghostliness within another surrealist trend, one that involves
a turning away from predominantly visual modes of expression
toward more material and tactile models. I will show how the ex-
plicit sensuality of her painted and graphic work anticipates her
own “tactile turn,” realized through the powerful physicality of the
figures she portrays, her luminous color palette, and her addition
of a blurred third dimension added to her two-dimensional works
Dorothea Tanning’s Gothic Ghostliness 121

through their conjuration of whirling movement that culminates
in her soft sculptures.
Gothic Heroines
One obvious link between Tanning’s work and ghostliness lies in her
open embrace of the gothic through visual and textual references. Her
painting A Mrs. Radcliffe Called Today from 1944, for example, con-
tains clear references to Ann Radcliffe, whose popular gothic novel
The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) was published two years earlier than
Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796), which was praised by Breton in the
“Manifesto.” Radcliffe’s novel focuses on Emily St. Aubert, a strong
young woman who escapes the sinister castle of Udolpho through
bold ingenuity; Tanning’s painting features a similar castle and a simi-
lar young woman walking its ramparts. Her blond hair is styled to
look like a mop: a humorous visual representation of her confinement
in the castle and the cultural assumption that she will devote her life
to domestic work. Like Radcliffe, Tanning troubles this cultural no-
tion by presenting a female protagonist bent on escape. Furthermore
she stages the young women’s imaginative power by presenting an
unrealistic setting, one that conforms more to the young woman’s
imagination than to her reality and that refers to Radcliffe through
the inclusion of gothic windows in an impressionistic castle chapel.
Three years after Tanning completed A Mrs. Radcliffe Called Today
in New York, she moved to Sedona, Arizona, with Max Ernst, who
would become her husband in 1946. In Sedona she continued to
paint and also drafted Abyss, a gothic novel about a seven-year-old
girl named Destina Meridian, who comes from a line of women with
second sight. Children alone have easy access to “that chimerical
world of perpetual astonishment,” explains Tanning, whose door is
“not wood but wonder, and the only hand to which it yields is the
hand of a child” (79). Abyss was first published in 1977; a revised
version titled Chasm came out in 2004 with the heroine renamed
Destina Thomas. Destina has inner knowledge that grants her ac-
cess to mysterious forces that can arouse terror in adults. At the

end of Abyss, she leaves the canyon landscape where she has grown
up: “[She] raised her face to the cliffs. Reflected in her gaze their
mysteries provoked no terror for she contained them all” (154).
For Tanning, as for Breton in the “Manifesto,” the sense of wonder
in childhood can be recovered only with effort, because it is only in
childhood that human beings are close to “real life,” as Breton puts
it, before having gone astray with education and adulthood (Mani-
festoes 40). The supernatural occurrences common to the fairy tales
Breton praises are more readily accepted by children than by adults,
which is why he advocates rediscovering one’s childish self in order
to reconnect with the “wonder” Tanning explores in Chasm, where
Destina has easy access to supernatural forces — a talent she loses
as she leaves early childhood behind.1
The terror possible in an old house common to gothic fiction also
emerges in Tanning’s paintings from the 1940s, in which young girls
struggle with strange forces. Children’s Games (1942), Eine Kleine
Nachtmusik (1943),2 and Palaestra (1947) bridge the transition in her
life from New York City to Sedona. All three present young women
in claustrophobic hallways that look as though they might belong
in a dingy old-fashioned hotel decorated in the American Victorian
style, the kind of setting in which one could readily imagine a ghost
story or spiritualist séance taking place. In Children’s Games two
young girls in Western Victorian dresses, heeled boots, and long
flowing hair tear down wallpaper with energetic determination in a
long, dark hallway (see fig. 24). The legs of a prone third girl extend
from the lower left-hand corner, showing that the struggle with the
ghostly forces behind the wallpaper has already resulted in a casualty.
Female body parts protrude disturbingly from the torn wallpaper — a
rounded belly on the left and a red orifice that appears to be aspi-
rating the red hair of the girl in the foreground on the right — so
that the forces in question appear linked to unrepressed sexuality
(located in the wall) and to the repressed desires these young girls
may be feeling but do not yet fully understand (signaled by their
Victorian-style clothing).

24. Dorothea Tanning, Children’s
Games (1942). © Dorothea Tanning.
Collection Dr. Salomon Grimberg,
Dallas.
The redheaded girl’s sexuality is on display despite her conservative

outfit, complete with a bow in the back resembling a bustle; her dress
is cut away from her neck down to her exposed buttocks, as though
the creature behind the wallpaper had stolen a slice of her clothing
and the tearing in which she engages so vigorously were aimed at
her own hymen. As in much gothic fiction, the girls in the painting
aim to unmask the spirits of previous women who found themselves
buried alive in this house and to escape such a fate. Alyce Mahon
compares Tanning’s young women to Lewis Carroll’s Alice, as does
Catriona McAra, who sees the “domestic space” in the painting as
similar to “the dollhouse architecture” in Carroll’s book (Mahon 153;
McAra 12). It is surely this painting that provoked critics to see erotic
“sex symbols” in Tanning’s work, an interpretation that irritated her;
she defended this work as “a testimony to the premise that we are
waging a desperate battle with unknown forces” (Between 336). In
Between Lives, she recasts an interpretation focused on unbridled

female sexuality as an interpretation centered on the humanity of
all young people struggling to define their place in the world.
The young women in Children’s Games clearly are waging a battle
to which one of them has already succumbed. They have “traversed
a distance which can only be described as infinite,” Tanning explains
in Abyss, “where fleshly violation is one and the same as torn wall-
paper” because of the equation between a woman’s body and her
house (78–79). The way these children attack the wallpaper serves
as a challenge to the conventions society imposes on their bodies,
particularly the convention that assumes a correlation between a tidy
house and a pure, inviolate feminine body. Dressed as children and
identified as such by the title, they convey a spirited independence
that recalls Radcliffe’s older heroines, and their game enacts a riddle
for those “who have ceased to be children” about the mysteries of
the lost imaginary world to which children retain access but adults
tend to forget (Abyss 78). The painting invites the adult viewer to
remember what it was like to be a child and to believe in the material
reality of the ghosts buried in the house, behind the walls, a burial
these vigorous girls seek to escape.
Eine Kleine Nachtmusik also shows two young girls in Victorian
dress in a dark, old-fashioned hallway, this one full of doors, like
an old hotel, a setting typical of dreams and ghost stories (see fig.
25).3 A mysterious light glows from behind one of the doors, which
is ajar, emphasizing the ghostly mystery that lies beyond view. The
girls find themselves in the fantastic situation of being menaced by
a giant, malevolent sunflower. Its bright yellow radiates outward as
though it were a heat-producing body of light. Out of the physical
heat of the Arizona desert Tanning develops sexual heat manifested
as forceful energy emanating from young girls. This energy is visible
in the way one girl’s hair stands straight up in the air as though elec-
trified.4 The other girl leans against the frame of a closed door with
a blissful expression on her face, a flower petal held tightly in one
fist, her bodice open to below her belly button. She is resting from a
victorious confrontation with the flower and possibly eavesdropping

on the intimate sounds, not proper Mozartian nachtmusik but the
night sounds of lovemaking coming from behind the door. The two
forms of heat evoke a powerful sense of claustrophobia: confined to
the roles suggested by their outmoded Victorian Western clothing,
these young women have energy to spare — energy that activates
everything around them, from the hallway walls to the natural world
outside in the shape of a sunflower that is attracted to them and then
blocked by them.
Eine Kleine Nachtmusik depicts play as a serious battle that the
girls are apparently winning: the sunflower looks as beat up as an
old tom cat who has been in too many fights, whereas the girl with
the electrified hair and the bold stance prevents its progress down
the hall and holds a stalk firmly in her grip as a sign of their victory
over the flower. These girls will not conform to culture’s imperative
to grow up, give up play, and settle down; nor will they conform
to the role of woman-muse that Breton, like so many male writers
25. Dorothea Tanning, Eine Kleine Nachtmusik (1943). © Dorothea Tanning.

Tate Modern, London.

before him, conferred on women. Their resistance is symbolized
by their defiance of the sunflower, Breton’s magnificent symbol for
surrealist love in his poem “Sunflower” (1923). This automatic poem
describes a night walk through Paris with an ephemeral yet physi-
cally alluring young woman. The poem turned out to be prophetic:
he unconsciously acted out this same walk one night eleven years
later with the painter Jacqueline Lamba, who became his second
wife in 1934. For Breton the sunflower emblematizes an encounter of
kindred spirits with an emphasis on his own masculine perspective.
Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, however, suggests that encounters between
male and female entities do not necessarily result in romance or the
dominance of the female by the male.
These girls will create their own fate, the way Tanning has done:
working as an artist throughout her life and adapting surrealism to
her own ends. “You play with the light, although there is no need, so
filled is your inner vision with promise, the kind that shifts behind
your eyes in and out of focus,” she wrote forty years later in her per-
sonalized depiction of the experience of surrealist automatism. “A
hundred forms loom in charming mock dimensions while with each
stroke (now there are five brushes in two hands) a thousand other
pictures solicit permanence. Somewhere the buzzer buzzes faintly.
Sounds from the street drift up, the drone of a plane drifts down.
The phone may have rung. A lunchless lunch hour came and went”
(Birthday 163, 166). Tanning describes herself at work in a way that
recalls the characteristic energy and sensuality of the girls in these
paintings — paintings infused with spirits, components that exceed
the visual, although they are still not fully tactile.
The third in this series, Palaestra, shows an ascending tower of six
children (see fig. 26). At the bottom we see a girl facing the viewer,
her eyes downcast and her nightshirt open. Above her head the other
girls twist this way and that in various stages of undress and sur-
rounded by sheets and pillows, ending with a naked child posed on
one knee at the top. These children clearly resist conventional notions
of propriety. In front of a closed door at the end of the corridor, a

26. Dorothea Tanning,
Palaestra (1947).
© Dorothea Tanning.
Collection Daniel
Filipacchi, Paris.
fully dressed girl-child wearing a cowboy hat and boots and holding
a whip stands at attention, confirming the defiance of the girls in the
human tower. To the left, enclosed in a strange, tall box, a mysterious
draped figure reaches out ineffectually to the children; their turning,
twisting energy escapes control. These children’s games cannot be
controlled by an older master, even one that appears to emerge from
dreams. The mysteries in these three paintings provoke no terror
because the children already contain such ghostly mysteries within
themselves, like Destina at the end of Abyss. They know as much
as any adult about natural life. The desire they convey pertains to a
struggle for control over themselves and the forces they encounter.
Like Radcliffe’s gothic heroines, spiritualist mediums, and Tanning
herself, these girls fight for the right to imagine as freely as they de-
sire.5 Unlike Radcliffe’s Emily St. Aubert, however, Tanning’s gothic
heroines show no desire to grow up and settle into a conventionally
domestic life.

From Gothic to Baroque
With Birthday, her celebrated self-portrait from 1942, Tanning syn-
thesizes the themes of her paintings of young girls from about the
same period (see fig. 27). She herself stands partially disrobed — her
shirt open to her waist like the bottom figure in Palaestra and the
girl gripping the sunflower petal in Eine Kleine Nachtmusik — with
her hand on a door handle that opens onto a baroque space, a series
of doors stretching to infinity, simultaneously contained and vast.6
There is something familiar about these doors, typical of New York
City apartments from a certain era and inspired by her New York
studio,7 a familiarity that disappears when the dizzying architecture
spins backward into an impossible, baroque space, the only indi-
cation from the setting that this space might be haunted by other
than realistic forces. The woman looks calmly at the viewer as if she
were asking herself what she or he is doing there in front of her.8 It
is the viewer who feels out of place. One has the impression that the
27. Dorothea Tanning, Birthday

(1942). © Dorothea Tanning.
Philadelphia Museum of Art.

woman has just been interrupted in the middle of a decisive action,
caught between departure and arrival.9
The woman’s clothing suggests a complex heritage. Her open jacket
over bare breasts sports royal purple, pale green and opalescent white
stripes, and lace cuffs and looks like something a Renaissance poet
would wear. Tanning thus attributes to a person who is obviously a
woman the easy accomplishments more readily associated with men
in the humanist tradition. Her skirt, in contrast, is made of fabric
that drapes about her hips like a curtain, barely attached at the waist,
which is decorated with a sort of apron made of elaborate roots and
brambles, linking this person to nature. This tumble of branches
just barely touches the hem of the poet’s shirt at the waist, while the
woman’s bare feet stand firmly on the wooden floors of the interior
space. Next to her feet crouches a fantastic animal, a kind of bear-dog
with wings and a forked tail, that Mahon calls a chimera (153). It is
apparently domesticated, perhaps brought back from that “alien lost
region” still accessible to children, a place where the supernatural is
ordinary and ghostliness reigns. Her shadow, which disappears into
the lower left-hand corner, mingles companionably with that of her
fantastic domesticated animal.
The real marries the gothic with verisimilitude in this apartment
in a manner that emblematizes other linkages in the painting. A
masculine intellectual erudition, materialized in the poet’s shirt and
inherited from the Renaissance, coexists with a knowledge derived
from nature, represented by the half-nude woman dressed in the
woodland flora typical of classical nymphs and by the strange animal
at her feet. This creature confirms that this woman belongs to two
worlds, to which she has easy access through the door on whose
handle her hand rests. She has domesticated the gothic, ghostly forces
that lurk behind mysterious doors, just as she has clearly tamed this
fantastic animal. She has moved through the classical, medieval
gothic, and Renaissance baroque eras into twentieth-century New
York, where she evidently feels at home; Tanning has normalized
her timeless aura into a condensed, ordinary present. The creature’s

presence also suggests the possibility that this woman is capable of
mobilizing forces latent within everyday life as well and as artfully as
any spiritualist medium, and of incarnating them in tangible forms,
pulling them out of an alternative realm and materializing them in
a living body. It is as though Tanning has integrated spiritualism’s
ghost into the work in the same manner as spirit photography, ex-
cept that this woman has conjured a creature that comes not from
the past but from her own living imagination; she has successfully
materialized into visibility her own psychic energies.
Unlike Claude Cahun or Lee Miller, Tanning does not rely on
anamorphosis for her ghostly effects. It is not necessary to look at
Birthday, for example, from two simultaneous yet contradictory
perspectives the way the viewer is invited to look at Cahun’s Hu-
man Frontier to see first a masculine humanist and then a wood
nymph. The two realities openly coincide, just as the otherworldly
creature who inhabits this woman’s imagination stares calmly back
at the viewer. The latencies that must be intuited in Miller’s Egyp-
tian landscapes are in Tanning’s work placed squarely beside the
everyday reality that might have disguised them. Her work sees no
need to hide what we intuit; she lets everyone see the coincidence
of imaginary and tangible realities.
The woman’s body in Birthday clearly represents a thinking body
that maintains instincts rooted in the natural world. This figure thus
reflects aspects of the mythic Androgyne admired by Breton, in
whose body masculine and feminine traits conjoin through a “juxta-
position of two or more distant realities,” according to the definition
of the surrealist image, typical of surrealist poetry (Manifestoes 20).
It is in this reconciliation of opposites that Mary Ann Caws sees the
most surrealistic aspect of Tanning’s work, a reconciliation equivalent
to Breton’s own “sublime point”:10 it is “the art of ‘intertwining’ the
way in which one element joins with another in a back-and-forth
swerve,” a style Caws also identifies as “baroque, as well as surreal-
ist and symbolist” (Surrealist 64, 66). Tanning herself identifies the
joining and twisting of different elements as a painter’s problem, what

she calls the “vanishing point” or “middle distance” that can never
be pinned down precisely and thus emerges as a ghostly place since
it stands as a point of reference that exists only in the imagination.
In Abyss she has already explicitly compared writing to painting.
Publishing a story comes “closest to the showing of a new picture
to friends,” she writes, “except for just one difference: the looking
eyes become reading eyes” (Abyss n.p.). In her memoir Between
Lives (2004), she transposes the painter’s vanishing point onto the
process she proposes to adopt in her memoir writing, as she begins
the narrative of her encounter with Ernst:
So the beginning is an impossible place, as meaningless as that
dot on my drawing in a class perspective lesson, the spot in the
middle of the paper where all lines — roads? — came together at a
place called Infinity. Only, supposing out of curiosity you tried to
go there, you’d never make it. The spot would have gone, would
have streaked ahead, and you would have to start all over again.
It was a trick not only of the eye but of fate itself for the point
was neither beginning nor end, just a stupid black dot that would
retreat endlessly.
Now on this diagram of my own devising, the lines, instead of
converging, open to reveal a middle distance where we contend,
Max and I, with all kinds of ardent ferment. (61–62)
This passage opens the earlier version of her memoir Birthday
(1986), where she compares her writing to a conversation in the
context of a dinner party that is also a philosophical exchange:
“You needn’t make excuses for putting on a banquet and inviting
one and all” (11). Both versions of her life are poetic, hybrid works,
crisscrossed with dialogues and characters according to her own
paradigm of the Platonic banquet or symposium. To tell a story,
particularly from the point of view of someone connected with the
collective dynamism of the surrealist group, is to participate in a
philosophical conversation — to pick up where others have left off,
to elaborate and add one’s own point of view.11 Her personal story

intertwines with those of others, as she explains at the beginning of
Between Lives with an image in which she transforms old friends
into fireflies, “each one a bit of phosphorus, a life that brushed mine
and caused me, in its glow, to exist” (8). No life exists completely
isolated, just as no singular reality exists without the possibility of
doors opening onto other doors.
The reader is invited to wander within the imaginative spaces of
both Birthday and the expanded Between Lives; it is impossible to
traverse either book in a linear fashion. These narratives structurally
resemble Breton’s Nadja and Arcanum 17, which follow the form of
a spiral rather than a traditional linear trajectory. Tanning’s story
turns back upon itself and relaunches, as in a book by Breton, who,
in Nadja, calls for “books left ajar” like swinging doors (18).12 What
Caws evokes as an encounter of opposites in Tanning’s paintings
may also be found in the “middle distance” to which Tanning refers
again in the poem “Sequestrienne.” The middle distance is a fabulous
and thus ghostly place lit by a “flame-green filament,” to which it
is possible to return only in memory, even as the temporal-spatial
present “sequesters” the speaker from the past. The act of memory
thus transforms her into the “sequestrienne” of the poem’s title,
someone who experiences the vivid past in an equally vivid moment
sequestered from the past in the present:
There was a time

of middle distance, unforgettable,
a sort of lace-cut
flame-green filament
to ravish my
skintight eyes. (Table 58)
The middle distance captures the dynamism of the principle of en-

counter typical of Tanning’s work, which by the 1960s opens onto a
surrealistically baroque sense of space, dizzying and turbulent, that
incarnates the sorts of ghostly latencies typical of surrealist objects.

Premier péril, from Les 7
périls spectraux (1950).
© Dorothea Tanning.
One of eight lithographs
for Les 7 périls spectraux
with the text “Pourquoi
rester muets?” by André
Pieyre de Mandiargues,
Éditions les Pas Perdus,
Paris.
Even before her work moved from two-dimensional to three-dimen-

sional forms, this lively personal psychic geography was present.
A vivid inner life certainly troubles the iconic women in Les 7
Périls Spectraux (henceforth The 7 Spectral Perils), the album of
lithographs Tanning made in Paris in 1950, after she and Ernst left
Arizona for Europe when the U.S. government denied citizenship
to Ernst. In this series of lithographs, accompanied by short prose
poems by André Pieyre de Mandiargues, Tanning evokes the ghosts
of Bretonian surrealism, beginning with his idea that books, like
doors, should be left “ajar.” She also evokes the ghosts of famous
female figures from the past such as Eve, Isis, and the Medusa, the
way Cahun did in her short stories, “Heroines.” In the first Peril, a
woman who dares to open closed doors armed only with a candle,
like Radcliffe’s gothic heroine Emily St. Aubert, prepares to enter a
giant book with an open cover that doubles as a door and has been
left “ajar” (see fig. 28). The young woman’s fist passes directly through

the door where the handle should be and holds a lit taper whose
exaggerated shadow is projected onto the first white page.
Like the female figure in Birthday, the woman in the first Peril
dares to penetrate with physical force into a masculine humanistic
domain — a large book — with the light of Enlightenment intellectual
insight represented by her taper, which also reflects her connec-
tion to nature through the resemblance of the taper’s shadow to a
fish tail. This resemblance is confirmed by the way her blue dress
twists into an anchor that then curves back up out of the inky water-
like blue at the bottom of the lithograph into a fish tail, linking the
woman to an underwater world that is at once natural, man-made,
and supernatural. This woman is both a human being and a fabulous
creature, like Melusina, the fairy from medieval French folklore who
once a month acquired a fish tail and had superhuman powers. This
connection to an underwater world as an alternate, ghostly reality
that acts literally as a shadow to the light linked to Enlightenment
thinking is further confirmed by the presence of a serpent’s head
snaking through the blond hair that streams down her back.
Tanning puts a woman in the place of the discoverer of new
knowledge that is at once intellectual and natural, linked to hu-
manistic traditions and to nature. This presentation of the woman
as an adventurer represents another way Tanning reimagines a sym-
bol of Breton’s: the surrealist as a navigator-explorer experiencing
the discovery of new land as “a very delicate flame,” an experience
enhanced “by the intoxicating atmosphere of chance” (Mad 25).
Breton completes his analogy of masculine discovery with nauti-
cal exploration in Mad Love by stating that it is “to the recreation
of this particular state of mind that surrealism has always aspired”
(25). By creating a woman discoverer of books linked to boats, to
the underwater world of fish, and to Enlightenment thought, Tan-
ning places a woman squarely in the role Breton had imagined for
himself and his male friends, as discoverers of new lands and seas.
She shows that a woman has equal access to the everyday reality of
books and to the ghostly, nightly knowledge linked to folktales in-

volving magic, transformation, prophecy, and foresight. She confirms
a woman’s access to two worlds, a facility that Breton had admired
about Melusina. She brings that female fairy from the past into the
present day, where the “peril” this woman faces has to do with the
reconciliation of these two worlds — underwater and land-bound,
natural and man-made, emotional and intellectual — driven by a
curiosity to know and reconcile both worlds.
The serpent’s head buried in the woman’s flowing hair serves as
a reminder of another hybrid creature: the mythological woman
transformed into a Gorgon known as the Medusa, a hybrid being
with serpent hair and the superhuman power to paralyze all men who
looked upon her. The Greek etymological root of the name Medusa
means “guardian,” the Latin version of which means “to think,” mak-
ing the Medusa doubly fearsome: a female hybrid guardian with the
capacity for reflection.13 Certainly Tanning’s woman-discoverer with
a serpent in her hair stands prepared for the reception of the written
thoughts of others. The serpent also corporealizes the kind of secret
knowledge that Eve sought to acquire in the Garden of Eden and to
which the Egyptian goddess Isis had access.14 The “spectral peril”
in this first lithograph may be found in the mythological ghosts of
Melusina, the Medusa, Eve, and Isis, who accompany this female
reader-discoverer-navigator as she penetrates into a symbol of knowl-
edge that for centuries was considered to be more appropriately at
the disposal of men than of women. These specters suggest that this
explorer will accomplish her quest of gaining and mastering new
knowledge, just as Emily St. Aubert was able to discover secrets
from her past and resolve her adventures through her bravery and
ingenuity in opening closed doors in Radcliffe’s gothic novel.
In the fifth Peril, Tanning invokes the “luminous phenomenon”
characteristic of the surrealist image, which “depends upon the
beauty of the spark obtained” from “the difference of potential be-
tween the two conductors,” as Breton explains in the “Manifesto”
(Manifestoes 37; see fig. 29). Tanning reformulates this electric charge
as a scientific experiment having caused an explosion. The woman’s

Cinquième péril, from
Les 7 périls spectraux
(1950). © Dorothea
Tanning. One of eight
lithographs for Les 7
périls spectraux with
the text “Pourquoi
rester muets?” by André
Pieyre de Mandiargues,
Éditions les Pas Perdus,
Paris.
long hair looks like a mop, a resemblance confirmed by the pres-

ence of an actual mop propped in the broom closet out of which she
conducts her experiment. Sticks of dynamite (“the two conductors”)
wired together, inside and outside of the closet, also have the shape
of the mop. The woman in the lithograph is thus visually connected
to her domestic duty of cleaning the house, like the female figure in
A Mrs. Radcliffe Called Today, and to her desire to conduct scientific
experiments. The woman is caught in midair in the aftermath of the
explosion she has made. She is transformed into a winged creature,
literally transported, floating just outside of the domestic closet from
which she has been ejected.15
Tanning’s closet crystallizes the interior space characteristic of
an American woman’s domain in the 1950s, particularly women
from cities like Tanning’s Galesburg, Illinois, from which she es-
caped when she moved to New York to become an artist. The closet

represents the environment she is expected to control and to which
she is expected to limit herself but which she has blown up. Similar
to a person in a trance or caught up in a hypnotic sleep of the sort
the surrealists experimented with, this woman’s upside-down head
bears a serene expression even as her recognizable leg appears to
mutate into a giant wing.16 This heroine is as capable of moving
back and forth between two worlds as the woman in the first Peril,
from the mundane world of everyday waking reality to the ghostly,
supernatural world of myth and folktale. Tanning embraces both
ideas: that women do have special access to nonrational alternate
worlds and that women also have equal access to the advantages
open to those who remain firmly rooted in the everyday world that
contains libraries and books and to which persistent women may
gain access with sufficient means and ingenuity.
The jump into an alternate world portrayed in Tanning’s fifth
Peril could be a voyage of no return, except that the woman’s serene
expression and mastery of her surroundings suggest that she can
control the dynamite as deftly as she can the mop. The encounter
here could be deadly or it could merely be transformative; the ex-
plosion could be an inner flash of insight, a metaphor for revelation
rather than a representation of a moment gone deadly wrong. Her
expression resembles that of Tanja Ramm in Miller’s bell jar pho-
tograph, caught between dream and mortality. The explosion also
reminds viewers of the “real explosion” Tanning describes experi-
encing when she saw surrealist art for the first time, at the Museum
of Modern Art in 1936: “Here, gathered inside an innocent concrete
building, are signposts so imperious, so laden, so seductive, and,
yes, so perverse that . . . they would possess me utterly” (Between
49). Like the first Peril, this fifth Peril can be understood to rep-
resent a moment between lives, when the heroine experiences an
awakening, an illuminating instant after her experiment’s success,
the moment that, as Breton claimed in Nadja, could make a person
“really see,” as though in a flash of light (19). It is that suspended
surrealistic moment Breton described in Mad Love, infused with

“the intoxicating atmosphere of chance,” before the subsequent flow
of words and images typical of surrealist automatism surges forth,
the flow that yields works of art (25).
Twirling into Ghostliness

Since at least the 1930s Tanning’s art has been characterized by re-
volving bodies, visible, for example, in four versions of Tango, from
1939, 1953, 1977, and 1989, and in Interior with Sudden Joy, painted
in 1951, after she and Ernst had left Arizona for France (see fig. 30).
Bodies embrace in a continuous movement of spinning, stopped
only by the instant of painting, as in a snapshot. Even the sense of
“immobility” Alain Jouffroy ascribes to Tanning’s work enfolds “the
traces of an eruption” (68, my translation).17 Such “traces” become
corporealized and whirl, lending even her two-dimensional figures
the illusion of a third, tactile dimension, moving her ghosts toward
ghostliness. Her bodies seem to have been caught in the middle of
a rotation, leaving the viewer with the sense of having glimpsed an
30. Dorothea Tanning, Interior with Sudden Joy (1951). © Dorothea Tanning.
Collection Selma Ertegun, New York.

ephemeral instant in the time it takes to turn one’s head. Interior
with Sudden Joy invites viewers to imagine the third dimension
conjured by the retinal trace left by the whirling pair, what Georges
Didi-Huberman calls la traîne visuelle in reference to Man Ray’s
films from the 1920s (243).
Beginning with the first Tango in 1939, Tanning makes bodies
pivot along an inclined axis and turn in a way that returns in Interior
with Sudden Joy to a classroom dominated by two adolescent girls.
Although similar to the young girls who inhabit the long corridors of
Children’s Games, Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, and Palaestra, these young
women are somewhat older. The way they both wear the same shade
of pink and provocatively reveal their underclothes confirms other
complicities. Similarly coiffed, their arms intertwined, their postures
are in mirror position; even their high-heeled pumps are identical in
all but color. Their body language and the cigarette casually dropped
by the girl on the left hint that they may have knowledge acquired
outside of the run-down schoolroom that surrounds them.
A notebook lies open on a luxurious cushion in the left fore-
ground. In the right foreground stands a large dog, confirming the
domestic safety of this setting. Through the rear door on the left
enters a mysterious person, calmly carrying a phosphorescent rose
object that resembles a magical talisman. On the far right a black-
board reveals a partial equation and the name of the Belgian capital,
Brussels, a geographic location associated with Rimbaud, the most
enigmatic of the surrealist forebears. His brilliant poems composed
at age sixteen and his statements in letters about poetry anticipate
surrealist automatism, beginning with the idea that poetry passes
through the body as though it were only a musical instrument, a
precursor idea to Breton’s vision of the automatist’s body as a “mod-
est recording instrument.” Rimbaud’s sudden abandonment of poetry
when he left Europe for Africa remains one of the mysteries of French
literature; Tanning’s confirmation of this link, with her explanation
that the writing on the blackboard consists of “notes from his secret
notebook,” indicates that these adolescents (who might also be prodi-

gies) may know secrets that generations of scholars have hoped to
discover (Tanning: Birthday and Beyond).
In the center-left of the painting, parallel to the two girls, a couple
spins, giving rise to the painting’s “sudden joy.” It is this pair that
causes time to stop, their turning suspended. A long-haired boy,
nude and black, eyes closed in a kind of ecstasy, embraces a giant
imaginary creature completely wrapped in sheets who dances on five
delicate points in place of limbs, wearing a strange hat and carrying
a book or stone tablet. This conjured figure resembles the sheeted
figure in Palaestra, whose gestures were ineffectual in controlling
the children. The creature holds the young boy benignly with an
enveloping arm and reveals a peculiar circle tucked into the folds
around its head. Neither an eye nor a face but possibly in the place
where an eye or a face should be, this circle looks disturbingly like raw
meat, like some interior part of the body exposed to the world — the
latent made troublingly manifest, not unlike the red flesh protrud-
ing from the wallpaper in Children’s Games. Rolled up in a discrete
flap of sheet, this worrisomely exposed flesh makes the figure seem
very much alive, adding substance to the belly and stretched leg as
it twirls.
The bright color of this fleshy circle, contrasted with the whiteness
of the sheet surrounding it as well as its position near the creature’s
head, suggests at once a flower in its formal wrapping and an absent
or invisible face. It serves as a reminder of the extent to which young
girls are often said to resemble cut flowers, wrapped and protected,
with their sexuality well hidden. Yet Tanning challenges the codes
that dictate such modesty, the way Bataille did in his essay “The
Language of Flowers” in Documents.18 Here the inside of the body
is shown, causing a moment of surprise. It represents a material-
ization of the surrealist theme of a world turned inside out.19 The
shock of this glimpse of the inside of a body, much stronger than
the glimpse of the inside of a human mouth — like Jacques-André
Boiffard’s photograph of an open mouth published by Bataille in
Documents (1930) — is domesticated by the boy who clings to the

draped figure, hugging him and smiling in gentle concentration.20
One of his knees, lifted in a joyful moment, barely breaks their raptur-
ous pirouette. The viewer impulsively completes their turn, mentally
watching them spin out of the frame in a virtual holographic whirl.
The imaginary couple incarnates the girls’ knowledge of poetry
and Rimbaud’s cosmic language that makes the imaginary real and
allows them to escape their dilapidated environment through the
vivid turns of their imaginations. The forces hidden behind the
closed doors in Eine Kleine Nachtmusik become embodied here
in the revolutions of the dancing couple. These girls calmly suc-
ceed in embodying the ghosts that float in their dreams through a
Rimbaldian “derangement of the senses” not usually extended to
well-brought-up young ladies; it is an imaginary “derangement” of
normalcy that permits the tactile materialization of their imagined,
dancing couple. The girls calmly make dreams simultaneously real
and ghostly through the retinal trace left by the whirl of the couple’s
dance. They ground Western knowledge and imagination in the body
in a style characteristic of many surrealist women, gendering surreal-
ist experience in a corporeal way and confirming surrealism’s tactile
turn as well as its link to the shadow of mortality that characterizes
surrealist ghostliness. These girls bring into lived experience Breton’s
idealized view of surreality. “I believe,” he writes in the “Manifesto,”
“in the future resolution of these two states, dream and reality, which
are seemingly so contradictory, into a kind of absolute reality, a sur-
reality” (Manifestoes 14).
Touch: From Virtual to Tangible

In Between Lives Tanning identifies the moment when the desire to
make sculpture erupted as a necessity in her well-established career
as a painter. She had already made Fetish, and twenty-six years had
passed since her painting Birthday had been selected by Ernst for
Thirty-One Women, his wife Peggy Guggenheim’s New York gallery
show.21 Tanning describes listening to Stockhausen’s “Hymnen” at a
concert in Paris in 1969: “Spinning [along with the notes] were the

earthy, even organic shapes that I would make, had to make, out of
cloth and wool; I saw them so clearly, living materials becoming living
sculptures, their life span something like ours” (Between 281). This
moment completed the emergence of the ghostly third dimension
that had always existed in the retinal trace generated by the revolv-
ing couples, concretizing it in the material and tactile shapes of her
soft sculptures.22 It was Tanning’s way of engaging with surrealism’s
nonvisual turn toward tactile creation that had begun with Ernst’s
collages, and it allowed her to complete a conjuring act comparable
to that of the girls in Interior with Sudden Joy, who produce the
dancing couple with their own energy.
Distinct bodies disappear completely from Tanning’s paintings
in the 1960s. She created Even the Young Girls in 1966, a painting
in which bodies are so much in movement that the spaces between
them are lost to the energetic evocation of pure motion, out of a
feeling that she herself was filled with an inner “choreography” (Tan-
ning: Birthday and Beyond).23 Her inner experience made her into
a dancer, in contrast to Foucault’s characterization of Breton as a
swimmer between words. The paintings of this period convey the
pure physicality of the dance, as though it were possible to see it
from the inside. This mutation into pure flesh that epitomizes cor-
poreality without representing isolated bodies leads logically from
explicit dance to a vibrant tumult within which everything moves.
The third dimension, ready to burst off the canvas, is already present
here in a latent state, in the ghostly blur of dancing motion. When
Tanning begins making sculpture in this decade, her inner experi-
ence of feeling like choreography merges with an ordinary, visible
reality, as anticipated in her work since Children’s Games.
Tanning made Fetish (or Pincushion to Serve as Fetish) twice,
once in 1965 and again in 1979, in small- and large-scale versions,
out of velvet and wool (see fig. 23). It sits at the origin of the spinning
organic shapes she began to imagine in multiple forms starting in
1969 and resembles a large stuffed animal seated on a single foot,
with an interchangeable neck and tail and a winglike ear. It is the first

object by her to “bring alive, so to speak, the phantom inhabitants of
her paintings” (R. C. Morgan 302). Like the non-Western sculptures
Ernst collected enthusiastically and knowledgeably, Tanning’s Fetish
invites the viewer to dream of other worlds, such as the lost world
of childhood. (No need to think of Africa or the Pacific islands, she
suggests, to feel transported.)24 With the pins that she invites her
viewers to stick into the work as they make a wish, Fetish looks like
a comically domesticated Kongolese nkisi, a wooden statue pierced
with ceremonial nails.25 In the manner of a Freudian fetish, its lush
fabric invokes desire, specifically the desire to touch something for-
bidden, since as a rule touching works of art is not allowed in galleries
or museums. A surrealist object, it is at once familiar and strange,
as though it were a stuffed animal from childhood, peculiarly out
of proportion.
Fetish’s interchangeable neck and tail are created as two hollows
that give glimpses of an inside that is not flesh, like the disturbing
circle in Interior with Sudden Joy, but golden, with the delicate hues
of a ripe peach. The sculpture irresistibly invites touching, an invita-
tion described by Donald Kuspit as “seductive uncanniness” based
on the fact that “touch is not only the most uncanny and taboo of
the senses, but, because it affords an abstract, cryptic connection and
instinctive, bodily intimacy simultaneously, it seems . . . the most
seductive, engulfing of the senses” (9). An air of the forbidden cir-
culates around this sculpture, at once solid and fragile. Like a teddy
bear, it seems almost animate, as though its safe softness contained
within it a disturbingly lively ghost.
Tanning has done her own sewing since childhood; it was difficult
to find fashionable dresses in the American Midwest in 1920s. With
her mother and two sisters she would “sew in a flurry” after studying
French fashion magazines.26 This intimate and practical contact with
fabric and everyday fashion stayed with her throughout her life; she
was reluctant to buy ready-to-wear clothing and preferred mixing
treasures from flea markets with new styles. For her soft sculptures
she made “a pact” with herself to do it “all on the sewing machine.”27

31. Dorothea Tanning, Canapé en temps de pluie (1970). © Dorothea Tanning.
Philadelphia Museum of Art.
This approach is also visible in Rainy-Day Canapé (1970; see fig. 31),
for which she chose upholstery fabric in gray tweed to create a living
sofa (and a chair in the same fabric for her living room). As troubling
as Fetish, this sofa’s provocation comes from its resemblance to live
bodies, human ones this time.
In principle, a sofa is an inanimate object on which we sit, but
Tanning’s sofa incongruously explodes with life. Between the iden-
tifiable shape of an ordinary sofa and the gray upholstery fabric that
covers it visibly human legs, thighs, and a belly erupt as though they
were the leftover ghosts of those who had sat and lain on the sofa
in the past. Disturbing and amusing in equal measure, it is covered
in a fabric associated with British elites that epitomizes bourgeois
propriety. She reminds us that even the most conservative bodies can
shrug off their tweeds and join together. Sticking out are the most

active body parts, the legs. It is their springing energy that gives
the impression that this sofa could jump up and run off, leaving
the viewer with no seat. There have always been active legs and feet
in Tanning’s work, signs of pent-up activity, as in Guardian Angels
(1946) and Door 84 (1984).28 In each painted figure lurks the ghost of
a complex interior life conveyed by her skill with opalescent shades
of white that, in her sculptures, shifts from virtual to tactile reality.
No longer trapped in American gothic hallways, these sculptural
bodies burst forth and corporealize all the rushing bodies in Tan-
ning’s paintings and drawings. They bring to fruition in gendered
terms the sensuality inherent in the more abstract “tactile turn”
imagined by Tzara in the 1930s.29 Tanning’s soft sculptures show how
rooted that “tactile turn” had become in surrealism as the movement
extended beyond 1969 (the year the movement supposedly ended)
into the 1970s and 1980s, while retaining all the sly humor of dada
and surrealism’s earliest days. In fact she created an entire hotel room
in 1989, Hôtel du Pavot, Chambre 202, for which chairs and sofas like
Rainy-Day Canapé provide the furnishings. From behind the striped
wallpaper, three-dimensional naked female bodies burst forth, as
in Children’s Games, suggesting that the ghosts of all the bodies that
have slept and squirmed within these rooms still haunt the space,
just barely lurking behind the walls and inside the furniture (see
Carruthers).
Spinning in Space
After Tanning’s return to sewing and her creation of soft sculptures,
her paintings began increasingly to incorporate a surplus of corpo-
reality that comes through in the incandescent light that illuminates
her works from within. This opalescent density conveys an intimate
knowledge of the numinous, like the secret knowledge contained
within her young girls, and can be appreciated fully only face to
face. It harks back to the gothic light emanating from the doors in
her Victorian hallways and the glowing sphere entering the room in
Interior with Sudden Joy. Her work increasingly fuses suspended time

32. Dorothea Tanning, Murmurs (1976). © Dorothea Tanning. Private
collection.
and spinning baroque space, as in the large painting Murmurs from
1976, the year of Ernst’s death (see fig. 32). A feminine body leans back
so far that the head is invisible apart from the hair cascading down
in the background. The arms are raised over the head and complete
the dizzying yet architectural arc of the half-moon shape on which
the body is anchored. The crossed legs descend below the lower edge
at the painting’s center and confirm this body’s tenuous balance.
A small mythical creature like the winged creature in Birthday, a
visible and embodied psychic “spirit,” hugs the female body around
the neck and looks directly at the viewer with a calm, confident
gaze. This fixed look lends gravity to the leaning body and suggests
that the abandon with which the woman’s body arcs backward is
purposeful, that the whirling space toward which the body inclines
attracts her without destabilizing her. The allure of empty space
also attracts the viewer, and, though it does not seem to confuse
the leaning body, it has an unexpectedly vertiginous effect. What
we see in the dizzying space are other bodies, recognizable in the
shape of a hand, a knee, an arm, a breast, a leg, that are far away but
luminous and spinning, like the stars at night when seen with one’s
head thrown back like the figure in the painting. Tanning’s psychic
geography here envelops her central figure and situates her squarely
within a vast yet incongruously accessible universe in which ghosts
have bodies that visibly coexist with our own in a newly baroque
form of the doubleness typical of surrealist ghostliness.
In Murmurs, Tanning claims, she hoped to capture the sounds of
space, planetary echoes, myths, memories, and constellations. She
wanted this space to be “as endless as any space can be in a paint-
ing that listens to its murmurs” (Tanning: Birthday and Beyond).
Murmurs recalls the circular paintings by Tiepolo that decorate
the ceilings of Venetian palaces and create the baroque illusion of
additional space, making rooms “full to bursting,” like the desert in
Chasm. With Murmurs Tanning opens up a wall and gives us the im-
pression that we could plunge through it fearlessly, like the body that
dominates the work. The immense space of Murmurs might not have

been possible without Tanning’s three-dimensional objects. More
than ever we have the impression of being able to circumnavigate
this painted body, the way one can walk all the way around one of
her sculptures. The density, texture, and ghostly spinning sense of
this space represent the culmination of Tanning’s work, her most
definitive stylistic signature. The viewer “is invited to enter into her
paintings,” as Alain Bosquet has claimed (n.p.). Sculptural, these
paintings reveal a life bubbling just below their calm surfaces. Quot-
ing Rimbaud, Breton concluded the “Manifesto” with the phrase
“Existence is elsewhere” (Manifestoes 47). Tanning devoted herself
to the concrete investigation of this surrealist tenet, except that, for
her, that ghostly “elsewhere” was often just below the surface of the
most ordinary objects and spaces in our houses. Tanning quotes
Rimbaud in her description of painting toward the end of Between
Lives; her mission, she writes, has always been revolutionary: “You
have been bold, working for change. To overturn values. The whirl-
ing thought: change the world. It directs the artist’s daily act. Yes,
modesty forbids saying it. But say it secretly. You risk nothing” (326).
The drama of Tanning’s works emblematizes one of the most im-
portant objectives of surrealism: to render visible the ghostly latencies
of the marvelous in everyday life. With Tanning these latent forces
become tactile and embodied as never before — playful, sexualized,
energetic, all the qualities that constitute human liveliness. They
become embodied and externalized, removing the psychic imagi-
nation from the dimension of the ephemeral and transforming it
into tangible, recognizable shapes. Her work suggests that all of life
blends in the ever-present middle distance, that imaginary place that
reconciles opposites, her version of Breton’s “sublime point.” Her
method, visible throughout her entire oeuvre, evokes the ghost of one
medium existing within another — of sculpture within painting, light
within darkness, masculinity within femininity, life within inanimate
objects, the extraordinary within ordinary domestic space, ancient
knowledge within childish innocence. These twists and turns render
palpable everything she touches, even ghosts, resonating with the

persistent vibrancy of an extra dimension. Spectral bodies persist
in crossing her works, including the large paintings she completed
at age eighty-seven: the stately, sensual, and sly flower paintings
reproduced in Another Language of Flowers (1998), in which ghostly
body parts appear. Tanning’s navigation of ghostliness in everyday
life drew her close to another American artist, who, as the next
chapter will show, looked for the ghostly in the reality of everyday
photography.

6 Francesca Woodman’s
Ghostly Interior Maps
My life at this point is like very old coffeecup sediment.

Francesca Woodman, letter to Sloan Rankin
Ghostliness emerges in Francesca Woodman’s photographs of houses

that appear haunted. With her settings, composition, and strategic
blurring she uses a documentary medium to show a double reality
in a manner that epitomizes surrealist ghostliness in part by deftly
recalling spiritualism, surrealism’s buried ghost. Like nineteenth-
century spirit photography, Woodman’s small black-and-white pho-
tographs, more typical in style of work by her avant-garde forebears
than her own generation, conjure illusions in a way that is funda-
mentally baroque. They appear to reveal a coexistence of realities
that also renders past and present times synchronous and puts into
question the constrictions of mortality, another preoccupation typical
of surrealist ghostliness. Woodman’s work conveys a sense of what it
is like to experience surrealist ghostliness from the inside out, both
intellectually and as a feeling.
Woodman once observed, “Me and Francis Bacon and all those
Baroques are all concerned with making something soft wiggle and
snake around a hard architectural outline” (in Davison 110). While a
student photographer in the United States in the 1970s, she described
herself as an artist more in line with Robert Desnos and the surreal-
ist baroque aesthetic than with the American gothic with which she
151
might more readily be linked.1 Her photographs eerily animate the
dilapidated houses in which they were shot, showing bodies that
look a lot like hers seeming to emerge from or disappear into walls.
Her goal to stretch photography’s limits of space and time results in
images that appear to suspend time in ways that dwell surrealisti-
cally on enveloping experience. Often set in houses that appear as
haunted as the houses in Tanning’s paintings, her photographs read
as maps to interior space projected outward onto the surrounding
domestic interiors that double and reflect her inner experience.
Most of Woodman’s photographs were taken when she was an
undergraduate at the Rhode Island School of Design. Many were
created as homework assignments, what Rosalind Krauss calls her
“problem sets,” explaining how Woodman “internalized the prob-
lem, subjectivized it, rendered it as personal as possible” (Bachelors
162). Corey Keller confirms this in the recent exhibition catalogue
devoted to Woodman, stating, “It appears she used assignments to
give form to investigations that were already underway” (174). Over
eight hundred of her photographs have been archived, from her
earliest self-portrait, shot when she was thirteen in Boulder, Colo-
rado, to photographs taken shortly before her suicide in 1981 at age
twenty-two. Although it may be tempting to read her work as auto-
biographically preoccupied with death, I see in her efforts to represent
visually the coexistence of life and death in human consciousness,
executed in a style that shows her immersion in the vocabulary and
techniques of surrealism, a lively response — in “problem sets” — to
an artistic challenge that harks back to Holbein’s Ambassadors. “I
am interested in the way people relate to space,” she wrote in her
journal. “The best way to do this is to depict their interactions to the
boundaries of these spaces. Started doing this with ghost pictures,
people fading into a flat plane — becoming the wall under wallpaper
or of an extension of the wall onto floor” (in Townsend n.p.).
Chris Townsend has convincingly established Woodman’s cre-
dentials as an accomplished practitioner of photography within the
postsurrealist and postminimalist traditions and as an artist who
152 Francesca Woodman’s Ghostly Interior Maps

used technique effectively to disturb the parameters of space and
time typical of her medium (59). A New York friend reports that
Woodman “intensively read André Breton” and wanted “to be able
to establish a similar relationship between words and her images as
those achieved in Nadja” (Gabhart 55). In Nadja, a work punctuated
by eerie photographs of urban places devoid of people,2 Breton relates
the strangeness of these images to the “unbearable discomfort” he felt
in a particular Parisian square, a feeling that, in his opinion, defied
psychoanalytic explanation (24). He makes the familiar strange — a
square in his native Paris — in order to impress upon his readers the
importance of receptivity as an everyday attitude: only those who
attune themselves willingly and receptively to the ghostly vibrations
underlying everyday settings will be able to perceive strangeness
within familiar environments.3 Woodman’s photographs succeed in
capturing the inexplicable way that familiar places can seem haunted,
which fascinated the surrealists, particularly if the haunting could
help to explain the self by revealing previously unnoticed realities.
Yet her images also tell stories, and it is their narrative function as
much as her practice that fascinates us and links her to surrealist
avatars.
In an interview conducted shortly after Breton’s death in 1966,
Foucault described surrealist automatism and Breton’s importance to
twentieth-century thought in terms of the philosophical “discovery”
of a space “of experience” in ways that pertain to Woodman, who
conveys visually the sensual vividness Foucault ascribed to Bretonian
automatic writing (Aesthetics 173).4 Foucault’s description of Breton
as “a swimmer between two words,” who “traverses an imaginary
space that had never been discovered before him,” aptly describes
Woodman’s photographic narrative sequences, in which images func-
tion as words or even worlds (173). Her images in sequences and the
shifting positioning of her body function as words and phrases, with
the blurred bodies acting as in-between links attaching one image
to the next.
In a distinct visual language Woodman evocatively maps ghostly
Francesca Woodman’s Ghostly Interior Maps 153

33. Francesca Woodman, House #3 (1976). Courtesy George and Betty
Woodman.
interior spaces at once intimate and vast, familiar and strange, and
shows how these realities coexist in a way that further enriches surre-
alist ghostliness. Her ghostly presence in an old house in photographs
like House #3 (1976) aligns her work with the gothic; she brings to life
the gothic ghostliness evident in Tanning’s early paintings through
her visual stories about women escaping from (or trapped in) old
houses (see fig. 33). The style of her visual narratives is reminiscent
of Tanning’s approach to coexisting realities shown side by side.
Like Tanning in her later work, however, she yields to the appeal
of contained psychic boundlessness typical of Desnos’s surrealist
baroque.5

For Woodman’s photographs also coincide with a baroque view of
the automatic body as portrayed vividly by Desnos in the poem “If
You Only Knew” (1926). Desnos represents the automatic experience
with the image of a body in the shape of “the night bottle of the poet”
that the poet can see into from the outside through an out-of-body
experience made possible by the automatic trance. Inside the bottle
that is himself he glimpses a space that is baroque because it is at
once as contained as the self and as distant as the constellated sky
(Essential 157).6 He watches the bottle capture a shooting star in a
surrealist anamorphosis whereby the self as a being coincides with
the self as a thing, opaque and transparent, mortal and timeless,
individual and cosmic.7
Woodman’s ghostly houses, at once animate and inanimate, func-
tion like Desnos’s body-bottle, like the house-body Eluard imagined
in “The Word” (1926), and like Lee Miller’s body-tent in Portrait of
Space, where the tent stands in for a sentient body populated by
multiple selves (see fig. 21). Like Miller, who reveals the “space”
beyond the skin-like screen in Portrait as a reflection and expansion
of inner perceptions and feelings, Woodman visualizes the surreal-
ist idea that many identities coexist within the self and that the self
may project outward onto the surrounding environment. Also like
Miller, she emphasizes inner spaciousness through outward mani-
festations. George Baker has remarked that the tactile dimension
of Woodman’s photographs emphasizes “what one feels as a body as
opposed to how one looks” (in Sundell 63). Her alternate realities are
materialized in her body’s capacity for simultaneous visibility and
invisibility and for seeming to appear as effortlessly as it vanishes.
By portraying herself as a ghost in an old house in photographs like
House #3, Woodman enacts and embodies surrealist ghostliness with
both gothic and baroque properties.
The blurred body in House #3 projects overlapping anamorphic
impressions: the body could be the house, or could be escaping from
the house through the chimney, or streaming into the house by
means of the light pouring through the window. We see the corner

of a room delimited by large windows with torn wallpaper strewn
across the old, uneven floorboards; the edge of a mantle shows on
the left-hand side. There is no furniture. Centered beneath the corner
window through which daylight streams, we see a foot with a Chinese
slipper, the sort women wore in the 1970s. Above the foot and lower
leg we catch only a blur, as though the foot had emerged from the
baseboard and as though the house itself were alive. Only on closer
examination can the blurred outline of a head and crouching body
be glimpsed above the foot, with another foot hooked around the
visible ankle.
The living body becomes an anamorphic ghost in this image.
Unlike the skull in Holbein’s Ambassadors, which portends death,
Woodman’s ghostly effects suggest that everything that seems in-
ert around us potentially thrives with a surrealistic inner life, with
latencies that an alert viewer can activate. Seeing a young woman
alive within the limits of a house makes the viewer think she might
be the ghost of a former inhabitant. It is this emphasis on vital-
ity that differentiates this photograph from spirit photographs in
which the immobilized ghosts seem incongruous because they are
revenants from the past, from another world. The naturalness of
Woodman’s ghost, “living,” as it were, in an ordinary environment,
makes visible the normally invisible in a way that lacks the con-
trivance of most spirit photography and shows how, in a surrealist
context, ghosts are always psychic, always multiple aspects of the
self. Woodman’s domestic spaces map the most hidden, perhaps
even terrifying aspects of living in a body as familiar and as strange
as a childhood home — ostensibly the most intimately familiar place
imaginable — that just happens to be haunted.
Narrative Pictures: The Stories In Between

Woodman’s serial images encourage the viewer to link them together
because her artistic technique “pushes the limits of the photographic
frame,” as Margaret Sundell notes (in Zegher 435). The series that
seems the most like a working out of ideas was shot in Providence,

34. Francesca Woodman, then at one point (1976). Courtesy George and Betty
Woodman.
Rhode Island, the city where Woodman lived as a student. Three
of the photographs have captions linking photography with piano
playing, establishing a correspondence between one medium and
another, suggesting that her series ought to be read linearly, like
music or a prose narrative. Each note, each phrase connects to those
surrounding it, the way Woodman’s bodies interact with their sur-
roundings; she achieves this effect in part in captions that begin
with conjunctions, such as “And I had forgotten how to read music.”
This photograph shows a clothed woman, only the lower part of her
face visible, holding a dried leaf in an outstretched hand. The next
image, with the caption “I stopped playing the piano,” shows a chair
beneath a mirror and a heart-shaped pincushion hanging on a peel-
ing wall. These two images, which do not relate visually to music,
nonetheless sustain music as the underlying reference in the third,
most striking photograph, which is annotated with another caption
that begins with a conjunction: “then at one point i did not need
to translate the notes; they went directly to my hands” (see fig. 34).
The notes here clearly refer to music yet also refer to written notes,
the kind that pass through the body when writing automatically, a
practice described by Foucault as “that raw and naked act, [when]
the writer’s freedom is fully committed” (Aesthetics 173).
The passing directly to the hands mimics the process of automatic
writing, which Breton defined as a process for expressing “the actual
functioning of thought,” “verbally, by means of the written word, or
in any other manner,” and which, in Woodman’s image and caption,
works primarily through a body that happens to be female, and spe-
cifically through the hands, the parts of the body that make writing,
music, and pictures (Manifestoes 26). Moreover she confirms a com-
ment made by Breton in 1921, that automatic writing was “a veritable
photography of thought” (Lost 60). Woodman’s own explorations of
automatic processes involving the exposure of experience through
photographic technologies may be seen as a visual extension of the
recording instrument Breton equated with the surrealist receptive
body in the “Manifesto.”

However, as a postwar American, she easily moves beyond the
limitations on women imposed by the equivalence male surrealists
made between the body and a woman — as though a woman prin-
cipally was a body. This equivalence began with the photograph
Ecriture automatique, published on the cover of the March 1927 issue
of La Révolution surréaliste, showing a woman taking dictation. The
photograph suggests that when automatic writing is represented as
passing through a body, that body will be gendered feminine. Ca-
hun, Miller, and Tanning all develop visual ideas about what goes
on inside the mind and body of such a woman during the automatic
experience, explicitly translating a male symbol for a body into an
actual, thinking human body that happens to be gendered female.
Woodman, inheriting the legacies of this earlier generation, more
freely represents automatic experience as embodied in a female
shape. Her “refusal of distinction between the self and the world
of objects,” notes Townsend, “subverts the ideological structures of
the gaze it uses” (61). She embraces the male surrealist vision of the
female form as an efficient vehicle for transformative experience
without the demeaning associations of being reduced entirely to
the body.
Woodman’s images consistently remind the viewer that automa-
tism is more physical than the abstract concept Breton describes as
“psychic automatism in its pure state” (Manifestoes 26). Building on
Foucault’s embellishment of Bretonian automatism with the explicit
claim that it requires doing as well as thinking — the “ethic of writing
no longer comes from what one has to say, from the ideas that one
expresses, but from the very act of writing” — Woodman’s images
take the physical reality of automatism as embodied a step further
(Aesthetics 173). Having come of age with the women’s movement
before any disillusion about its successes had set in, she is unafraid
of the alliance of the body with a woman’s body. In her vision, that
alliance places no limitations on what that body might do, think, or
dream.
Of Woodman’s three captioned shots from Providence connecting

music, writing, and photography on a psychic level, the last one tells
the most coherent story: “then at one point i did not need to translate
the notes; they went directly to my hands.” This fills in the loss evoked
in the captions of the preceding photographs — the forgetting (of
reading music) and the stopping (of piano playing) — and substitutes
the direct transmission of creativity (the hands) for loss. It empha-
sizes the hands and what they do and identifies the nude figure as a
maker, someone whose body acts as a vehicle for expression, who
gives her body free rein while retaining observant consciousness of
its process: “No longer playing by instinct, her body has become an
automatic producer of images,” comments David Levi Strauss (127).
Despite the forgetting and stopping, music can transfuse this body
because she maintains its openness to the music of what Breton
in the “Manifesto” called the surrealist voice, which was what the
body–recording instrument was supposed to capture. Woodman’s
phrase transposes the written note onto a visual image that figures
a kind of birth, as though she had been born whole and adult into
this abandoned place.
The photograph portrays the artist as a reversed Botticelli Venus
protected by her shell, except that her back is to the viewer and
only the beauty of her outstretched hands shows. The central figure
crouches in front of a decaying wall, her naked back covered by fallen
wallpaper. If we consider this image as a map to interior space that
invites reading, the outer, corporeal location we attempt to reach lies
in the indentation between the figure’s shoulder blades — at the site
of a circular tear in the wallpaper shell. This draws the eye upward to
the head, a rhyming dark space but one that is full, sharing only with
the torn paper the implication of receptivity, since the tears in the
paper open up the house walls to touch, to the gaze of outsiders. The
eye continues to travel upward to the hands, spread apart, supporting
the body against the stained wall. The wall’s ridges, gouges made to
hold glue — the otherwise hidden underpinnings of the outwardly
visible patterned paper — rhyme with the fingers, emphasizing their
sustaining importance for the crouched figure.

This Venus is not a perfect winsome blonde but a disheveled
brunette; she has emerged not from the sea but from a moldy old
house situated not on the Mediterranean but in New England, and
her shell is manufactured, not natural. The Italy that inspired Bot-
ticelli also gave Francesca her name; she spent time there as a child
and again a year after this photograph was taken on a year abroad
during college. It became another setting for her work and was a
place where her appreciation for surrealism deepened.8 Botticelli’s
Renaissance Italy serves as a recognizable cultural geography that
Woodman overwrites with her vision of Venus as a figure defined
by culture rather than nature; she portrays Venus as a modern artist
whose birth is self-generated, even if, like Botticelli’s modest beauty,
she remains self-protective.
Despite the decay, the architectural features that anchor the im-
age — the baseboard, an old telephone outlet, and the edge of a win-
dow frame — suggest that this neglected house lives on and can offer
protection to this vital human creature, head bent, hair tousled,
whose shadow shows she is real even if the setting lends her a mytho-
logical air. Woodman overwrites the viewer’s knowledge of art to
demonstrate her revision of past figurations of the woman in a work
of art, transforming her from passive model to active creator. One
way she accomplishes this transformation is by hiding the model’s
face, connecting the viewer more directly with the anonymous body
and with that body’s experience, with its acts.
The companion piece to this image is from a different series,
Space2 (see fig. 35). It dates from the same year (1976) and seems to
be similar to the previous series, also shot in Providence, and was
probably shot in the same room. It again features a nude woman and
wallpaper. This time, however, the woman stands facing the viewer
and actively holds the wallpaper over her lower and upper torso, in
place of Botticelli’s Venus’s natural and more passive hand and hair.
The wallpaper appears to be attached to the wall; it seems that the
woman is emerging purposefully from the wall, a ghostly figure from
ancient myths about transformation found in seventeenth-century

35. Francesca Woodman, from Space2 (1976). Courtesy George and Betty
Woodman.
fairy tales or eighteenth-century gothic novels. Closer examination

reveals that the wallpaper is detached from the wall and actively
manipulated by the woman.
The house’s decrepit state reminds the viewer of gothic precedents
such as the novels by Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis, in which
the supernatural was normalized and houses seemed alive. How-
ever, this house has been stripped of the patriarchal menace pres-
ent in gothic eighteenth-century novels and Tanning’s Chasm. The
body that blends into and emerges from it at will is not that of the
house’s prisoner-victim. The viewer is invited to consider the inner

geography that this house-body reveals. What is it like to inhabit
such a body, capable of emerging fully formed into such a ruin, as
though disconnected from chronological time? The question stems
from the narrative function of Woodman’s images in series, which
tell stories of girls at play in ramshackle houses, for example, laying
claim to spaces from which, paradoxically, all signs of domesticity
have vanished, leaving them free in the way Tanning’s young girls
struggled to be. Again the baroque overrides the gothic with the
sense of infinity contained within an incongruously tight, finite
space, for despite the limitations of this old house the girls-bodies
passing through it overcome its physical boundaries and transform
it into a metaphor for a richly animated inner life.
Experience: Maps to Inner Space

Woodman works at the edges of boundary distinctions because of
the way her series shot in Providence and her Space2 series map her
interior space through the marker of her own body. “She could blur
the distinction between the ordinary and the surreal with a tough
exuberance,” confirms her friend and sometime model Sloan Rankin
(in Chandes 37). This explains the emphasis on process in Wood-
man’s caption about not reading, not playing the piano but using her
hands. The intentional erasure of distinctions — between music and
writing, textual and visual narratives — also illustrates the extent to
which her use of herself in her photographs, or of friends who looked
like her, was not intended as a visual autobiography of Francesca
Woodman but as a study of experience, which, in her case, clearly
involved ghostliness. “When asked why she used herself as a model,”
Peter Davison reports, “she replied, ‘It’s a convenience — I’m always
available’” (111). “Francesca was ashamed that she took so many pic-
tures of herself and was irritated by the simplistic self-portrait label
attached to her work,” adds Betsy Berne. “The reality was she was
her own best model because she alone knew what she was after” (6).
Woodman’s use of herself as a model without an identifiable face
allows her figure to become at once familiar and oddly unknow-

able. This cannot have been entirely disingenuous, since she often
used as models friends who looked like her, with the result that it is
often difficult to know for certain if the body in the photograph is
Woodman’s. This again makes us see how the houses also stand in
for animated domestic bodies, within which the multiple versions
of the self, all of which bear close resemblance to one another, may
emerge and disappear at will. A shot from 1976 spoofs this habit by
showing three nude young women who closely resemble one another
holding prints of a headshot of Woodman in front of their faces. So
while she used herself because she was “available,” she clearly chose
bodies and spaces with a degree of familiarity, so that from series to
series, image to image, the viewer would acquire a sense of déjà vu,
even if such bodies and spaces had previously been unfamiliar. She
conjures the uncanny sense in her viewer of having seen this body,
this house, somewhere before, of seeing a person at once strange
and familiar, of having seen a ghost.
The photographs in which Woodman shows her body in move-
ment challenge photography’s link to the real as a familiar, knowable
phenomenon in the same way that Breton sought to tease out the
uncanny quality of the unconscious through receptivity to automatic
processes. Woodman similarly uses her photographs to defamiliarize
her own body within familiar domestic spaces, to make it appear
ghostly while very much alive in a way that encourages viewers to
question what they think they know about their surroundings. She
makes the uncanny explicitly ghostly, an awareness of mortality with-
out morbidity. As with her piano shots, she emphasizes emergence
and creation over disappearance, life over death. Her photographs
operate as a kind of writing and explore photography’s indexical
properties, its persistent and tangible reminder of the precise instant
in the past when the shutter was depressed, as well as its elegiac
quality, in which that moment is recorded as always lost, finished,
and in the past, its capacity to communicate ghostliness, of the pos-
sible psychic coincidence of past and future in an intensified present
moment (see Barthes; Derrida, “Deaths”).

Woodman captures photography’s haptic quality with her use of
black and white and the sensual plethora of grays that render her
textures particularly tactile, like the dirt she rubbed on herself in
order to blend into a Roman wall, part of another old structure.9
“One needs to feel the textures of the surfaces and objects in the
pictures against bare skin,” writes Rankin. “I know this because on
many occasions I was immersed in flour or some other matêrial”
(in Chandes 35). Woodman’s series, what one friend calls her “diary
pictures,” tell as much as they show — a familiar story of transfor-
mations, disappearances, and reappearances (in Sundell 435). She
could be asking herself Breton’s question from Nadja (11): What or
“whom [do] I ‘haunt’?” And yet the words that might complete the
narrative seem out of reach, the way her ghostly body seems to be
moving just beyond visibility. Her version of surrealist ghostliness
indeed shows what it feels like.
What is it like to feel invisible some of the time, Woodman seems
to be asking, to be the ghost herself? What is it like to feel oneself
disappear? Beyond the experience of the body as a recording instru-
ment, surrealist automatism provides an experience of process, into
which one could potentially and vertiginously disappear altogether.
Are not these feelings typical of being alive, of plunging into the
process of taking photographs and losing a cohesive and coherent
sense of the self in the experience of writing or photographing? Both
photography and automatic writing happen spontaneously yet involve
careful preparation. Both produce simultaneously a work and the
record of a practice, encompassing both conscious and unconscious
awareness, like Woodman’s notes that go directly to the hands without
intermediary and are translated into images.
Woodman’s Space2 series, shot between 1975 and 1977, consists of
sequences of photographs involving blurring. In several of them the
blurred body destabilizes the human figure — it is no longer a familiar
form with which the viewer can immediately identify — and replaces
it with movement in a way that echoes spirit photography and also
the psychic intensity Foucault ascribes to Bretonian automatism.

36. Francesca
Woodman, Space2
(1976). Courtesy George
and Betty Woodman.
Woodman strengthens this psychic intensity with her confirma-

tion of automatism’s physicality, using images of active bodies in
motion. The blurred image of a woman shaking her head and of a
nude woman pressing her body against the glass walls of a vitrine
box direct the viewer away from the external shape of the body
and toward the experience contained within it. These images lead
us toward an interior space that we may only intuit via Woodman’s
blurred body, that we can understand only if we stop “reading the
notes” in her metaphorical parlance and abandon the attempt to make
a literal reading of the images, allowing ourselves to swim between
them. “The best pictures are the ones she didn’t know were there,”
writes Berne, “the ones where her instincts took command — and
she knew that too” (5). They were like automatic writing transposed
onto photography.
The first Space2 sequence shows Woodman fully dressed, wearing
boots (see fig. 36). She steps forward and bends her body toward the
camera so that the viewer sees reaching more than a body. Wood-
man explores what Foucault described as “boundaries” in his essay
on Breton and as the limit and its transgression in his study of the

work of Bataille.10 She pushes the limit between her body’s visibility
and invisibility, between the body and its environs, yet her body also
serves as a stand-in for everybody. Her blurring highlights the expe-
rience of blending into one’s surroundings, of feeling at home in a
space. The subjectivity of the human being neutralizes the surround-
ing decay, becoming universalized in this process and momentarily
lifted out of chronological time. We see her body and beside it, in
a contiguous relation, the same body disappearing into a blur, into
a ghost of itself, like a spirit photograph but one in which the spirit
is the same person as the living human being. Woodman captures
the psychic feeling of a porous self.
Her blurred-body Space2 photographs reinforce the notion of
practice as an activity essential to surrealism. Like Ray and Miller,
whose timing, framing, and cropping made of straight photography
a window onto another world that blended the double reality of
everyday consciousness and dream, Woodman similarly practices
showing her own body as simultaneously real and ghostlike. In her
House series, for example, her body is strangely insubstantial and
partially disembodied, blurring the boundaries between the human
body and its setting in a way that shows how she succeeded in her
stated goal of exploring “the way people relate to space” by depicting
“their interactions to the boundaries of these spaces” in a series of
“ghost pictures” (in Townsend n.p.). As a result, she also achieves her
goal of surrealistically tricking time in a manner typical of the way
surrealist ghostliness disrupts chronological time by concentrating
on a suspended present moment, showing the future reality of the
human body as a ghost concurrently with the present reality of the
body as inhabited by ghosts — of thoughts, musical or textual notes,
or images.
Like the iconic anamorphic painting The Ambassadors, Woodman’s
work reminds the human viewer of the uncanny and thus ghostly
role mortality plays in experience. Within one moment she shows a
sequence in time, aligning one reality with another. Her photographs
read as maps to this inner life; their destination lies at the edge of per-

ception, in between the shots. Townsend describes this phenomenon
technically as a practice of “unraveling . . . photography’s structuring
dimensions of space and time,” which places Woodman squarely in a
dissident tradition of American photography, drawing at once from
surrealism and from precursors like Duane Michals (11, 15, 17).
Woodman’s work builds on knowledge yet simply shows worlds
that require she decipher its clues. Her square black-and-white
prints have been described by Faye Hirsh, for example, as having a
“vintage” nature, “precious and beautifully crafted,” reminiscent of
“photographs by Man Ray,” which distinguish her from her “more
pop-inspired, appropriationist contemporaries” such as Cindy Sher-
man (46).11 Woodman also experiments with the camera’s power
to trick the viewer into seeing the anamorphic ghost of an illusion
within another image, something surrealists loved to do, from Ray
and Miller to Brassaï (see fig. 17). Woodman’s version of such sur-
realistic shape-shifting forms shows a woman wearing a vintage
dress lying on a quilt, her head thrown back; it is shot from the side
(see fig. 37). The odd angle of the head and the textured blending
of the dress and quilt call into question the nature of what we are
seeing: a play in texture? A mannequin? A human being? We are
never certain with Woodman of what or whom we are seeing. This
is Woodman at her most surrealistically anamorphic, where one
image hides another enfolded within it.
This surrealistic slippage between what is alive and what is not,
what we are seeing and what we are only imagining, dominates the
second Space2 sequence, where a nude woman crouches in a glass
vitrine (see fig. 38). For Woodman, “the idea of the display case as
a container to be looked into” expresses “the idea of a contained
force trying to be freed,” as she explains in her journal (in Townsend
n.p.).12 The woman’s hands press up against the glass; her head and
features are blurred. The image focuses attention on the act of seeing
through the glass and also, metaphorically, the body encased within.
The camera is set up to make us peer into the vitrine, as if through a
window, inviting us to search inside. This invitation extends the pro-

cess of seeing from the outside to the inside; the glass vitrine operates
as a kind of metaphor for the desire to penetrate interior space, to
read it like a map, the way Desnos explored his own night bottle, an
avatar of himself — a baroque inner space that flips into reverse and
suddenly reveals that inner reality to be as extensive as the universe.13
Desnos’s metaphor for the dizzying and disorienting effect of
automatism, the looking inward that it produces as the poet gives
free rein to the unconscious, suggests an inner geography that is vast
and beautiful. Through the configuration of the body as potentially
transparent, against which the human being can only push with
her hands at the limit between inside and outside, Woodman sug-
37. Francesca Woodman, Untitled (1975–78). Courtesy George and Betty

Woodman.

38. Francesca Woodman, Space2 (1975–76). Courtesy George and Betty
Woodman.
gests a parallel curiosity, together with a concurrent anxiety. In her

photographic variation on Desnos’s poetic image such space presses
psychically on the artist from the outside. This pressure is confirmed
in a shot involving two models, one blurred and crouching inside
the vitrine, the other draped over the top looking in yet inert. Here
the viewer has the sensation of seeing through a double protective
layer of glass and skin. The two bodies together confirm that there is
something potentially dangerous about this experiment with space,
with the skin, that is like glass and yet within glass, which separates
the body from outer space as well as inner geographies, because of
the fragility of the membrane it exposes.

On Becoming a Ghost: Woodman’s Angels
The On Being an Angel series Woodman began in Providence and
continued in Rome during her year abroad (1977–78) explores further
her expansion of the body’s limits in parallel with the permeability
of time. The first two studies represent a partial female body — only
the head and breasts. In one image we see the face; in the other
we see only the lower face upside down with the mouth open — an
uneasy invitation to look inside (see fig. 39). These figures mirror
angels in European churches, the seraphim in the mosaics in Saint
Mark’s Basilica in Venice, for example, whose bodies are limited to
heads and wings. Like the seraphim, Woodman’s arms and shoulders
and the curve of her breasts show the body in a birdlike posture, as
though it could fly. An umbrella propped in the corner of one image
suggests that a modern convenience could help to propel this angel
into flight in the manner of Mary Poppins, a more contemporary,
domesticated angel.
The Roman versions of the Angel series emphasize the associa-
tion of angels with flying. In one, a gloved hand holds a delicate,
diaphanous piece of white fabric and shakes it. Its blur suggests that
were the arm to drop it, the fabric might defy gravity and fly on its
own. Two other photographs link white fabric with wings and fly-
ing. In an attic in another old house, suspended white fabric could
be wings. Woodman jumps in front of this winglike fabric, dressed
in a Victorian-style white petticoat with black tights (see fig. 40).
Her blurred body — arms outstretched in one version — echoes the
winglike drapery of the hanging fabric and makes us imagine that
she is flying away. This body is more ethereal than Mary Poppins’s
and less reassuring. The leap does not seem capable of containing the
figure within this world. We sense that the attic could disappear, yet
we know rationally because we associate it with Woodman that this
body must remain earthbound. With this transgression of familiar
limitations on the body, Woodman once again challenges us to see
through the body’s blurred contours into the psychic geography
within it, an inner space that flips outward and defies limits. Brunella

Antomarini notes that in her images “we are shown . . . how to view
a cosmos and recognize ourselves as part of it” (106–07). Woodman’s
role-playing is part of the appeal of her photographs, which attract
powerful responses because of their intimacy and their focus on an
anonymous yet vital individual.
The invitation to look within physically as a metaphor for psychic
inner exploration, hinted at in the Angel photograph with the figure’s
open mouth, is confirmed in another photograph taken in Rome.
This one does not fit with the attic ghost-angels just described. It is
of a nude torso shot bending backward from the waist toward the
39. Francesca Woodman, On Being an Angel (1977). Courtesy George and

Betty Woodman.

40. Francesca Woodman,
from Angel series (1977).
Courtesy George and Betty
Woodman.
viewer; the model’s head is once again upside down, the mouth
open.14 This shot makes reference to the others and reminds us
that while floating away clearly intrigued Woodman, she remained
rooted in the body’s present moment of experience. Splattered paint
resembling streaks of blood stains her leaning body and spreads out
in arcs on the wall behind. Perhaps at the limit of inside and outside,
this body is also at the limit between living and dying, yet in the
moment of the scream, facing death, it is most intensely alive, like
the screaming bodies in the disturbing paintings of Francis Bacon,
with whom Woodman expresses affinity in her diary. The painted
body against the painted wall underscores both the haptic and the
writerly qualities of photography and of Woodman’s use of the body.
Her body becomes the shifting sign in her visual automatic writing
and invites the viewer to swim with her from one medium (pho-
tography) to the next (writing). She embraces Artaud’s insistence
that life lies in the gesture, the movement of the body, and that these
gestures represent the most vital sign system available to us.15
One last Angel series photograph from Rome pulls together some
of these themes. All we see are two nude leaping legs (see fig. 41). In
their movement alone they disrupt the equation of a woman with

41. Francesca Woodman, from Angel series (1977–78). Courtesy George and
Betty Woodman.
an object, of a woman with passivity. Their strength lends them

vitality that reminds us of the emphasis on energetic legs in many
of Tanning’s works. The backdrop is another dilapidated wall. Its
white edge behind the legs visually intensifies the importance of
the white fabric from the previous photographs. If we were to look
at these photographs in sequence we could imagine a white wing
extending down behind one of the legs. Beneath the feet two gouges
extend; they rhyme with the legs above. We are reminded of a par-
tial earthly snow angel, familiar from childhood, but in reverse;
instead of the body’s imprint having been made as a result of lying

face up and seeing the world as sky, it would have been made with
the body lying face down, looking into the earth. We see the legs
as if they were caught springing up over the gouges in the earth, as
though they had just sprung up and backward out of the ground.
More than any of the other Angel photographs, this one shows two
realities moving away from one another, neither of which connects
fully with the viewer’s sense of a body’s limits. None of us could lie
face down and leave an imprint only of our legs. Yet this photograph
makes it seem possible because of the fairy tales read in childhood,
the magical images seen in medieval and Renaissance art, and the
sense that this photographer’s inner life makes it possible for her to
see beyond the real into a parallel universe.
Woodman often dresses up in old or vintage clothes, and yet she
never looks disguised. Fashionable and affordable for college-age
women in the 1970s, these outfits nevertheless lend her a contem-
porary air while simultaneously adding to the vintage look of her
prints.16 Invariably she appears as a timeless young woman out of
the past springing into the present. These photographs emphasize
the way her visual score works linearly in stories while at the same
time evoking synchronic chords wherein one sense of time and real-
ity harmonizes with another. For example, she presents a house that
could be a body animated by ghosts if we consider it anamorphically
one way (as a house) and then another way (as a house-body). At the
same time, she presents an empty house that, on a second glance at
the blurred portions of the image, yields the ghosts that will come
into the house in the future, once the house has been abandoned. She
ably presents ideas in timed sequences that nonetheless are captured
within single images. She follows Desnos’s and Tanning’s surreal
method of using poetic substitution of one thing (here, a house)
for another (a body). Arthur Danto identifies “a recurring motif ”
in her work whereby she undergoes “some sort of metamorphosis,
from one state of being into another” (n.p.).
The viewer observes Woodman’s transformations and recognizes
the universal mutability of identity as declared in the surrealist asser-

tion that we are recording instruments, mere receptacles for voices
and ghostly versions of ourselves that come into consciousness and
pass through us, of dreams that shadow our waking lives. Memory
and present reality merge in an unending relay of diverse experi-
ences perceived by listening for Breton and by seeing for Woodman,
allowing past and present to coexist in a suspended in-between
present moment when both realities possibly converge. Foucault’s
characterization of experience marked by the “infinite space where
doubles reverberate” as linked to the human awareness of death could
describe the surrealists’ notion of perception as always allowing for
occasional ghostly glimpses into a double reality (Aesthetics 93). In
1926 Desnos explained how he discovered “the perception of eternity”
in his pursuit of his “nocturnal dream self ” as he walked the Paris
streets while awake (“Confessions” 19–20).17 Working squarely in
the same avant-garde artistic tradition, Woodman makes a similar,
visual statement about living in parallel realities, conscious and un-
conscious, of a lived reality crossed with ghostliness.
In her photographs of actual moments in past time, Woodman
shows how the past anticipates the present. With her blurred images
and in the evanescence of her bodies as they disappear before our
eyes she suggests that the visible world is only an illusion; there is
another reality baroquely enfolded within it, just beyond reach of
the lens. She succeeds in persuading viewers that we might glimpse
that inner world if we could only squint hard enough and turn our
heads to look obliquely, as with an anamorphic painting like The
Ambassadors. At the same time, more like Tanning’s vision of the
coincidence of realities, Woodman’s photographed self plays roles
that follow that self from one state of being to another, the way all
selves metamorphose in time while remaining somewhat the same.
Woodman’s photographs map an interior space that we none-
theless recognize as our own, confirming surrealist ghostliness as a
universal experience that extends beyond the historical limitations
of the surrealist movement. She invites her viewers to follow her
into her imagined inner world, simultaneously assuring us with

the indexical nature of the photographic process that these inner
worlds are as fully real, as fully familiar, as anything we have ever
seen. Whereas Miller’s photographs hint at hidden bodies freshly
departed from the scene, yet whose ghost lingers, Woodman shows
the extent to which those bodies are still there, still palpably visible
in the ether. Hers is a photographic assertion of the same emphatic
claim for the reality of imagined dream bodies that Tanning made
in her paintings. Woodman shows how the visual anamorphosis of
surrealist ghostliness works.
Woodman makes visible a palimpsest effect, allowing past, pres-
ent, and future to coincide in a single moment and mapping the
way time past and present may be made to coincide with a trick of
light, causing time to “wiggle.” When she wrote to her friend Sloan
Rankin, “My life at this point is like very old coffeecup sediment,”
she noted the physical traces of the past experience of drinking
coffee and the future experiences the dregs might predict — coffee
grounds being one of the ways fortune-tellers predict a person’s fate
(in Chandes 37). Time was flexible and permeable for Woodman, and
her photographs leave behind directions for how to let peripheral
vision and knowledge infuse and enrich the present.
Another artist linked to surrealism, a Belgian veteran of the Cobra
movement, Pierre Alechinsky, meditated on how maps can reflect
time. Except that his maps expand beyond his body and his house,
to a broader European terrain. In the 1980s, when he began to paint
with ink on old nineteenth-century maps, he too created a palimpsest
effect, whereby the history and politics of Europe swirl together into
an equally personal narrative in which an individual experiences the
haunting of the present by times past. Alechinsky’s ink paintings on
maps spiral forward in time from when these old maps were first
created, even as they spiral backward to a present moment, from
when trade routes signified more than national frontiers. His inner
worlds may be more explicitly political than Woodman’s, but they
are just as ghostly, picking up yet another thread from the fabric of
surrealist design.

7 Pierre Alechinsky’s
Ghostly Palimpsests
At the tip of the brush. It occurs to me — I live for

these moments — to invent a line. Sweetness, sharing; the
recognition of a line!
Pierre Alechinsky, “Sengaï,” Lettre suit
Pierre Alechinsky’s superimposition of historical time periods and

worldviews in his ink drawings on old maps create coexisting pa-
limpsestic realities that quintessentially embody the concept of sur-
realist ghostliness. His Central Park (1965), chosen by Breton for
the last major surrealist exhibition before his death,1 was the first
of Alechinsky’s paintings to feature what the painter calls marginal
“remarks” — brushed or inked line drawings that resemble writ-
ing and create a visual frame bordering the central image — which
firmly map the interconnecting double realities that have increas-
ingly become a signature for his work (see fig. 42). Reflecting his
early training as a printer and his subsequent embrace of painting,2
Alechinsky’s works marry spontaneity to craft, impulse to reflection,
contemporary emotion to history, image to text, margin to center,
painting to writing, fine art to artisanship.
A youthful member of the short-lived Cobra movement, which
grew out of the Surrealist Revolutionary Group in late 1948, Ale-
chinsky became close to Breton in the last years of the poet’s life.3
In the 1980s he began to create ink paintings on old maps, layering
179
42. Pierre Alechinsky, Central Park (1965). © Pierre Alechinsky.
the ghosts of Cobra and surrealism in palimpsest fashion over a

host of historical ghosts conjured by the maps. His paintings extend
surrealist ghostliness into the 1980s with a meditation on time and
history comparable to Woodman’s experiments with time and space,
as he envisions diachronic historical periods as synchronous within
the scope of human imagination, whereby the present is haunted by
the past within the present. Like Woodman, Alechinsky was clearly
in dialogue with the surrealist legacy of automatic practice, with
the rhythms of suspension and flow, though he does not identify
himself as a surrealist. His dialogue is perhaps best crystallized in
the paintings he made in 1984 on the pages of a nineteenth-century
atlas, Page d’atlas universel (I–X).
180 Pierre Alechinsky’s Ghostly Palimpsests

Cobra, Surrealism, Spiritualism, and Art Brut
Alechinsky’s link to surrealism was both personal and historical.
Born in Belgium in 1927, three years after the publication of the
surrealist “Manifesto,” Alechinsky, like the surrealists a generation
earlier, came of age during a world war. After World War II he joined
Cobra, a movement founded by artists who came originally from the
northern European cities that lent the group’s name its three syllables:
COpenhagen, BRussels, and Amsterdam. “Cobra was a little Europe
before Europe,” Alechinsky told me, not unlike the Bénélux coun-
tries — Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxemburg — created around
the same time and an avatar of the European Union.4 Spiritualists,
surrealists, and Cobras all sought access to inner psychic regions,
although the Cobras were the most explicit about doing so for the
sake of making art. When Joseph Noiret describes Cobra process,
it sounds a lot like a description of surrealist automatism but with a
greater emphasis on the body’s involvement in the process of making
art: “Preoccupied with the interiority of the text, they [Cobra artists]
are unconscious of the gesture of the hand that moves. Nonetheless,
the entire body speaks” (57, note 1, my translation).5 “A painting is
not a composition of color and line,” declared Constant Nieuwen-
huys (who signed his work Constant) in the Cobra “Manifesto” of
1948, “but an animal, a night, a scream, a human being, or all of
these things together” (30). Painting should be elemental, a direct
and material expression of the unconscious, with “the greatest pos-
sible latitude . . . thereby opening up ever wider perspectives for the
comprehension of the secret of life” (29).6
Spontaneity was the Cobra group’s response to surrealist automa-
tism, which they criticized for being overly conceptual, even though
the language they used to describe spontaneity overlapped with
descriptions of surrealist automatism from a generation earlier. In
his essay on painting published in the journal Cobra in 1951, Alechin-
sky describes painting as a language, emphasizing the importance
of discovering “an interior writing leading to an organic discovery
Pierre Alechinsky’s Ghostly Palimpsests 181

of the self ” (“Abstraction” 5, my translation).7 He highlights the
key Cobra concept of “spontaneity” in his opening paragraph: “A
work prompted by sensibility, emotion, spontaneity, will never be
abstract; it will always represent human beings” (4). It should evoke
a responsive “spontaneous emotion”; at the same time it involves
preparation. Reflection is synchronous with spontaneity, he insists:
“La réfléxion synchrone la spontanétité.” For him, spontaneity is an
impulse, “une impulsion,” but not everyone has it.8
The concept of spontaneity also links Cobra to Art Brut, the name
given by Jean Dubuffet in 1949 to art by the mentally ill, children,
and self-taught artists “unscathed by artistic culture” (“Art” 33); it
was dubbed “outsider art” by Roger Cardinal in 1972. Alechinsky
has identified Art Brut as a “natural child” of surrealism;9 Cobra
and surrealism share an appreciation for this kind of unschooled
art. The spontaneity the Cobra artists sought within themselves is
the quality that distinguishes Art Brut artists. Max Ernst, who in
the 1920s introduced the surrealists to Hans Prinzhorn’s Artistry of
the Mentally Ill (1922), a foundational document for the study of Art
Brut, so admired the work reproduced in Prinzhorn’s book that he
openly imitated it.10 Prinzhorn declared that the “untrained” mental
patients in his care “spontaneously created pictures” (3).11 Art Brut
was acknowledged in the journal Cobra in April 1950, when letters to
the editor were published from both Dubuffet and Gaston Chaissac,
an artist Dubuffet had identified as an exemplar of Art Brut. Many
self-taught artists created works in response to inner voices they
believed they were channeling, just as both Cobra and surrealism
paid tribute to the repressed ghost of spiritualism within surrealism
and thus to the historical root of surrealist ghostliness.
The Cobras also reproduced art and poems by children in their
review Cobra. In the 1948 “Manifesto” Constant declared, “The child
knows of no law other than its spontaneous sensation of life and feels
no need to express anything else” (Nieuwenhuys 30). Breton had
evoked children as naturally able to access that inner “state of grace”
he mentions in “The Automatic Message” (1933), having already

declared in the “Manifesto” (1924) that it is “perhaps childhood that
comes closest to one’s ‘real life.’ . . . Thanks to Surrealism, it seems
that opportunity knocks a second time” (Break 143; Manifestoes 40).
For Alechinsky, however, the adult artist must not aspire to be like
untrained artists such as children; instead he or she should practice
attunement to the place in the self that produces the unadulterated
spontaneity that years of schooling tend to eradicate. He describes a
focus on receptivity that echoes Breton’s admiration for receptivity
in the “Manifesto.” “It takes years,” explains Alechinsky, “to find the
childlike inside oneself. At the outset, one is an old man. Cobra is a
form of art which heads toward childhood, tries to recover folk art
and child art for itself. With the means available to adults, non-naïve
means. It is not naïveté that is required” (in Rhodes, Outsider 34).
Alechinsky’s style, for all its magnificent force that shows the
recovered freedom of a child’s untamed imagination, is nothing
if not sophisticated. He uses his style intentionally to question the
hierarchy in Western art that privileges the artist over the craftsman,
for example, the painting over the book. He blurs the distinctions
between writing and painting by maintaining a sense of intimacy, of
touch, characteristic of handwriting. He has said that the Western
style of painting on an easel resembles the pose of a fencer (Roue
118). The distance between opponents separated by the sword in the
art of fencing disappears from his work, partly because of the way
it conjures the closeness and immediacy of writing through visible
brush strokes and a calligraphic style. By effectively transforming
writing and drawing, painting and the book, into complements for
each other, almost as though they were puns at once textual and
visual, he enacts a version of surrealist ghostliness by causing the
viewer-reader to find the first medium’s ghost buried in the other.
We read his images, see pictures in his words.
Alechinsky’s writerly borders and predellas, painted in bands
surrounding his color works and supporting them at the bottom,
look like visual elements to be read as well as seen. He deliberately
confuses the two activities, forcing us to see his symbols interchange-

ably as visual and verbal, inviting us to read narrative clues in the
images, always embedding the ghost of the verbal in the visual and
of the image in the narrative. His method of endlessly enfolding
writing and painting into one another paradigmatically embodies
surrealist ghostliness, the way Desnos’s punning “Rrose Sélavy” po-
ems do. It confirms Breton’s contention in “The Automatic Message”
that the “single, original faculty” at the root of automatism, found in
“primitive peoples and children,” combines both written and visual
expressions, writing and art (Break 143).
There was a “great interest within the Cobra movement in script,”
explains Willemjin Stokvis in her book on the movement. “The
work of many of the members, especially where writing and im-
ages were mixed in the word paintings, shows an interest in script
as spontaneous creative expression, as a seismograph of the human
psyche” (217). In Christian Dotremont’s essay in Cobra 7 (1950) on
significance and signs, “Signification et sinification,” he conceives of
handwritten words as visual signs, in anticipation of his invention
of the logogram, a brushed painting of words. Alechinsky described
painted script as an exaggeration of writing (Deux 66–67).
Cobra paintings were known for their recognizable forms — a
kind of idiosyncratic language — executed with a childlike simplicity.
This propensity also endures in Alechinsky’s work in his repeated
use of trees, volcanoes, labyrinths, spirals reminiscent of mythical
cobras, setting suns, wheels, and manhole covers. As he explained
in an interview at the time of his show at the Guggenheim in 1987,
“Long ago I elaborated a vocabulary made of images. I drew from the
things laid out on my table next to the paper and the inkbottle — ex-
ceedingly humble things. . . . And then, emerging from them, like
sequences of free associations or like puns, I saw all my lady-loves
appear, and also the feathered headgear of the Gilles dancers of the
Carnaval de Binche” (Alechinsky and Gibson 25).
After Cobra disbanded in 1951, Alechinsky met Walasse Ting, from
whom he learned to paint on a horizontal plane, using ink mixed
with water allowed to flow down through the brush’s tip. In Roue

libre (Free Wheel), he describes his discovery of Ting’s technique:
“In October 1954, I observed Walasse Ting in Paris, in his room on
the passage Raguinot, in Chinatown: he was crouching in front of
his paper. I followed the movements of his brush, the speed. The
variations in the speed of a stroke are important, the acceleration
and braking. Immobilisation. The light irremovable mark, the heavy
irremovable mark. The whites, all the greys, the black. Slowness and
dazzling speed. Ting hesitated, then found the solution right out of
the blue, like a cat landing on its feet” (see Draguet 164). Painting
on the floor led to Alechinsky’s study of Japanese painting and cal-
ligraphy and his strong sense of connection to an eighteenth-century
Japanese monk known as Sengaï, who haunts him at times. “I am
Sengaï,” he wrote in 1992. “Our lines communicate. At the tip of
the brush. A fleeting, and oh so delicious certainty of acting with
obedience, guided by something more than oneself, by something
less than will, thanks, precisely, to the faculty of disappearing into
a neat system” (in Draguet 226). His practice harks back to the dual
modes of surrealist automatism linked to surrealist ghostliness: a
prepared and meditated receptivity to spontaneous impulses and
a rapid, nearly unconscious execution. It also involves at times the
spiritualistic conjuring of an actual ghost, the Japanese painter monk
Sengaï, whose work not only moves him but seems to have invaded
his being.
Painting with a brush on the floor involves immobility followed by
speed, spontaneity that has been prepared by training and triggered
by concentration. According to the Cobra theory of spontaneity,
Alechinsky’s practice is not open to all, the way Breton imagined
surrealist automatism might be. And yet the work that brought him
to Breton’s attention, Central Park, has at its center a childlike head
of the sort that makes some people say, “My kid could do that.”
Alechinsky’s Topographical Imagination

Central Park heralds Alechinsky’s topographical imagination with
its surround of marginal “remarks” — decorative borders that, in

the manner of a map, invite reading as well as looking. These im-
ages were inspired by rare printer’s proofs from which marginal
commentaries have not been erased, creating the effect of medieval
manuscript illumination and marginalia (Alechinsky and Gibson
15–16). The arresting shape at the painting’s center appears to depict
an open-mouthed head. This head could belong to a child; in its
simplicity it resembles a drawing that might have been made by a
child or an Art Brut artist. According to Alechinsky, however, this
shape is how he saw the park’s outline and its topography when he
first saw it panoramically from the apartment of friends on Central
Park South, a view also captured in a photograph by John Lefebre
at Alechinsky’s request (see fig. 43).12 A double image, at once literal
and imaginary, the head we see constitutes Alechinsky’s literal view
of the park alongside his personified map of all the human emotions
he associates with the park. It thus crystallizes a new, literalized ver-
sion of surrealist ghostliness, that, like Tanning’s version, allows us
to see both realities simultaneously.
Under Alechinsky’s brush the park’s lakes become elements in a
face, evolving into a head, its mouth open, and staring back at the
viewer. In his autobiographical catalogue notes, he refers to hearing
over and over the injunction “[Never] cross Central Park at night.”
Octavio Paz even wrote a poem about this painting in 1986, in which
the phrase “Don’t cross Central Park at night” serves as a refrain,
43. Photograph
created by John
Lefebre (1966) at
the request of Pierre
Alechinsky to show
the pattern in his
painting Central
Park (1965).
© Marion Lefebre.

preceded by a description of Alechinsky’s painting as “an anamor-
phosis” in which the coincident images involve a cobra and Alice
in Wonderland: “Central Park has been transformed into a green,
black and golden Cobra”; “Alice, the Queen of Diamonds in our
sleepwalking deck” (in Alechinsky and Gibson 10–11). In this bold
painting named for an iconic park, the real park, which undergirds
it, doubles the painting like an anamorphic ghost, the way, in an
exquisite corpse game, the latent, dream image is more real than
the superficially evident image; the actual body we only imagine is
more real than the one drawn in stages during a surrealist game.
Psychic realities often have greater truth.
Furthermore Central Park contains within it the ghosts of Co-
bra and surrealism in its representation of nonrational feeling: fear
would have been the logical response crossing Central Park at night
in the mid-1960s when a walker’s perspective would be blurred by
looming dark shapes and the ground underfoot. The view becomes
magnified by emotion. Alechinsky blends these realities — visual,
visceral, imaginary, real — into one powerful image that communi-
cates strong feeling around which the border represents the constant
mental chatter that accompanies experience. He began with a pho-
tographic map and created another, imaginative one — transforming
the photographic map into an emotional map with his portrait of
how we might feel crossing the park at night, childlike and afraid,
our mouths perhaps open like the face in the painting. Central Park
portrays inner and outer realities coinciding at a geographic, map-
pable location that triggers powerful responses: a child’s fear of the
dark quite possibly blended with pleasure at the transgression of a
parental injunction not to go out into the woods at night.
Central Park began Alechinsky’s adventure with maps and map-
ping in the 1960s, but it wasn’t until the 1980s that his love of old
paper prompted him to turn to outmoded maps for a way to continue
mapping inner emotional realities linked to geographic locations.13
“I use . . . paper . . . several centuries old,” he has written, “for draw-
ings, watercolours, prints. Very beautiful sheets, which don’t look

their age” (“Castles” n.p.).14 This love of paper as the quintessential
material for calligraphic painting prompted many works in which
his drawings act as commentary on the original image.15 It was
connected, for Alechinsky, to the Cobra’s interest in “the material
imagination.”16
In the Cobra tradition, Alechinsky’s images act as a kind of writ-
ing in which the original designs live on as ghosts underneath the
new images. This approach highlights his process of receptivity and
preparation, on the one hand, and of rapid response, on the other — a
mirroring of the double mode of surrealist automatism involving
suspension and flow. His ink paintings on maps enact this double
mode of practice. He began with a painting on a map of Athens — sent
to him by a friend who knew of his love for old paper — that slyly
incorporates the outline of a self-portrait. He then turned to obsolete
air force navigational charts; one of these paintings, Exquisite Words,
was created out of a desire to create “a kind of Eskimo picture” in a
tribute to Duchamp’s 1922 tongue-twisting Rrose Sélavy nonsense
poems.17
When Alechinsky completed Exquisite Words in 1982 he wrote
that in painting on the map he felt as if he were mounted on a wan-
dering brush, recognizing, as they moved together, “the friendly
silhouettes, indelible, left by the wake of the Chinese ink on the
lithographed blue” of the chart (Deux 195). He had found a way of
painting that combined the interlocking characteristics of stillness
and spontaneity at once typical of surrealist automatism and Cobra
practice and characteristic of surrealist ghostliness because of the way
this process mimics possession of the psyche by ghosts — whether
internal or not, surrealist or spiritualist. This process allowed him
to create as if he were a medium speaking in his own inner voices.
At the same time, he situated himself in relation to his own history
as a Belgian living in France, a European of Western and Eastern
origin; his parents, both doctors, came originally from Belgium and
the Crimea.
Starting in the 1960s Alechinsky began to make a signature im-

age out of the celebrated protagonist of a yearly carnival in Binche,
Belgium, named Gilles. This figure appears and reappears in his Page
d’atlas universel (I–X) from 1984, a series of ink paintings executed
on ten nineteenth-century maps representing France at the center
of the known world, a worldview that dates back to the seventeenth
century, when Louis XIV began France’s colonialist expansion north-
ward and southward and to sub-Saharan Africa, Asia, the Pacific
Islands, and, briefly, North America.
Maps represent two-dimensional reconstructions of three-di-
mensional realities pertinent to a particular time and place. They
never are as objective as they might seem. Alechinsky’s paintings
enter into dialogue with the old maps he uses as “support” for his
image-based language. He transforms them and the worldview they
represent into ghosts from the past while at the same time making
them visible in a new way, almost as though he had dipped them
into developing fluid to allow us to see that past through his own,
personal lens — to see, for example, the dominant West under the
threat of subversion by the North and East. Maps allow the viewer
to see entire landscapes in one glance, giving the fleeting impression
of owning what has been seen. Yet Alechinsky’s map paintings defy
such an impression of mastery and introduce as a counterpoint his
personal view, colored by his father’s Crimean past, his mother’s
Belgian heritage, his personal links to northern Europe, through
Cobra, and to France, where he lives.18 His layering practice evokes
medieval palimpsests, in which an older text underlies a newer one
and interacts with it, creating convergences through time, space, and
history akin to the ghosts of spiritualism inhabiting surrealism and
surrealism haunting Cobra in an explicit rendering of the doubleness
that characterizes surrealist ghostliness.
Alechinsky’s maps suggest that the past lives in the present, that it
is always with us and within us. Like spiritualist photographers and
surrealist automatic poets, he succeeds in making that diaphanous
legacy visible. He emphasizes the fixity of rational chronological
time (as Woodman did in the 1970s) as a way of asserting the psy-

chological reality of the experience of time. His maps create a visual
narrative about Europe that highlights the nonlinearity of historical
forces through his invocation of the medieval carnival tradition. The
maps illustrate the way the nonrational haunts the rational, the way
the unconscious works within the everyday.
To the orderliness of chronological history Alechinsky opposes
the Gilles, played by multiple costumed and masked men born in
Binche. He uses this carnival figure as a nonchronological marker
of history. The Gilles dress in outlandish, mummer-like costumes
with ostrich-feather caps, and they stamp and dance in wooden
clogs, marching and turning in the medieval streets, carrying woven
batons and baskets of oranges they throw randomly into the crowd.
Like American mummers, the Gilles are often working-class men,
who participate in the carnival out of tradition. The Gilles is an
iterative figure who returns in the same costume doing the same
dance generation after generation, waiting for the carnival and then
turning in the annual performance. His ancient dance follows the
rhythm of the dual mode of surrealist automatic experience, which
also involves receptivity followed by plunging into the work and
giving oneself over to it completely. The Gilles emerges from the
particularity of Alechinsky’s Belgian childhood and his connection
to the medieval period, as evident in his love of old books, early
printing, and manuscript illuminations. The Gilles also connects
to Alechinsky’s Cobra and surrealist-inflected past through his as-
sociation with the subversion of rational hierarchies inherent in the
carnival itself.
A nineteenth-century legend has it that Marie of Hungary
launched the Gilles character at the carnival of 1549 to impress her
brother, Charles V of Spain, and in honor of his recent conquest of
Peru. The plumed Gilles — whose name supposedly originates in
an imitation of the Spanish name Gil — was meant to represent the
conquered Incas. Samuel Glotz debunked this legend in Cobra in
April 1950, contending that the Gilles figure comes from the oldest
medieval, possibly even ancient carnival traditions. Yet Alechinsky

finds the legend plausible as a modification to the already ancient
Gilles.19 Associated in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries with
then current preoccupations with conquest and national pride, the
Gilles figure also harks back to the organized reversal of hierarchi-
cal social order into planned chaos for a limited period (like the
charivari) that the medieval carnival allows, as Mikhail Bakhtin has
shown in his well-known study of Rabelais. The release from rules
is still symbolized in Binche by the way the Gilles throw oranges at
the crowd, an act that represents the free expenditure of coins and
plenty. Alechinsky describes a key encounter with the Gilles when,
in 1946, he went to Binche for the first postwar carnival. “We had
just come through five years without oranges,” he writes. He was
impressed with the “battle of oranges” thrown by the Gilles at the
crowd, “a frenetic dance to the sound of drums and pipes” (Lettre
110, my translation). The dancing Gilles suspend historical time,
like a perpetually returning spiritualist ghost, as the ageless carnival
is relived in the present. Just as spiritualism ultimately sends the
message that no one dies, the carnival’s tradition has it that life and
society are governed by immovable cyclical patterns of order and
chaos, power and loss. The Gilles partake of the link that automatic
stillness and accelerated motion have to dreamtime through auto-
matic practice — which may be prepared in advance but the rushing
release of which generally flows in unexpected, unmanaged direc-
tions — when an entire story may be contained within a minute and
likewise be repeated as perpetually as a folktale.
The old pages from the atlas over which Alechinsky has painted
are as clearly outmoded as the navigational charts he had used previ-
ously. His twentieth-century visual commentary on the maps seems
to call for a return to the universal legibility of simple shapes and
forms, like the recurring faces spread across their pages. These faces
resemble those visible on cathedral walls sculpted before literacy
became widespread. In anticipation of a new reversal he seems to
invoke the famous speech from Hugo’s Hunchback of Notre Dame,
when the medieval cleric predicts the replacement of cathedral carv-

ings by printed books, the power of the image by the power of the
word.20 Alechinsky shows how printed texts may in turn be drawn
and covered over in a palimpsestic style reminiscent of premedieval
graffiti art that cycles back to cave paintings and the earliest forms
of political commentary. He persists in showing Europe’s ghostly
past and the way it underlies the present.
At the time of the supposed Renaissance origin of the Gilles leg-
end, for instance, Belgium was almost as united and divided as it is
today, by politics, language, religion, and culture. Burgundian in the
fifteenth century, then a province of the Spanish Habsburgs, modern-
day Belgium became in the sixteenth century part of the territory
divided into the Northern and Southern Netherlands; it achieved its
current shape only in the nineteenth century, after belonging briefly
to the Netherlands and then to France, before becoming reabsorbed
into today’s European Union.21 Like a spiritualist or surrealist me-
dium, Alechinsky conjures Europe’s past in order to show how far
Europe has come and yet how much of it has stayed the same, how
much is haunted by the past.
Alechinsky’s cartoonlike drawings remind us that time can spiral
backward as it moves forward and that the maps no more govern
those who read them than a coloring book necessarily directs the
child who sits over it with a handful of crayons planning to color
outside the lines. The impulse to deconstruct as much as to construct
that is typical of children defies a simple chronological notion of his-
tory: a child’s creativity can animate a trained painter’s imagination
and trump his historical knowledge. In their stillness and invocation
of turning movement, these drawings also continually hark back to
the two models or gestures of automatic experience: the one poised
and listening, the other boldly plunging and turning in a spiral-like
whirl.
Alechinsky’s Gilles shows up in three of his ten maps: in the
third map (of northern France and Belgium), featuring the Breton
and Norman cities of Nantes and Rouen; in the seventh map, of
Alexander’s empire; and in the tenth and last map, showing all of

southern France and featuring the cities of Marseille and Lyon. The
other maps show Iberia, southwestern France, Turkey, the Mediter-
ranean Basin, the “sacred geography” of the Middle East, and the
world known to the ancients. All the paintings use the underlying
original map’s colors as support for Alechinsky’s ink brush strokes;
they emphasize changes, transitions, departures (see Alechinsky,
Butor, and Sicard 88).
The first of the map-paintings to feature a Gilles, the third in the
series, retells the myth of Europa, the maiden abducted by Zeus, who
transformed himself into a bull in order to capture her attention and
steal her away to Crete, where she bore him three children (Stapleton
81; see fig. 44). Alechinsky’s bull’s head follows the outline of the
coast of Brittany; its forefeet extend downward toward Bordeaux.
The body of the Gilles astride the bull juts up along the outline of
Normandy; the schematic head pushes out into the North Sea, the
left arm extending along the Belgian coast. Around Gilles’s head his
44. Pierre Alechinsky, Page d’atlas universel (III) (1984). © Pierre Alechinsky.

typical feathered headdress winds up to the picture frame and snakes
out across the lower United Kingdom into the boxed city maps of
Nantes and Rouen, taking up the entire upper left-hand corner. A
single feather then coils down, from one city map to the next, recall-
ing Cobra’s snake motif and Alechinsky’s personal vocabulary of the
spiral.
Europa seems to be headed away from her homeland toward the
sea, as in the myth, only this bull’s head faces northwest instead of
southeast. Furthermore the mythological nymph has assumed the
form of a shape-shifting carnival character, whose face is a cipher — a
character traditionally played by a man. Her story has been altered
from that of a simple girl transformed permanently into a god’s
consort to that of a working-class man transformed for a day into
a dancing Gilles king. France, cross-dressed as a Belgian, and Eu-
ropa, cross-dressed as a Gilles, have become figures for the worker
who serves his community in everyday life and is sustained by a
brief, annual communion with a shared European, mythical sense
of history as it is embodied in the rituals of the carnival. Although
grounded in twentieth-century reality, this Gilles also speaks of the
will to remember and revive the wonder and play of a prerationalist,
pre-Enlightenment past.
Alechinsky’s map captures this Gilles in costume, a man whose
plumes make him look womanly, a working man caught in an act of
escape, at a moment of movement, possibly of transformation, free
to shift between states of mind, being, place, and time. Alechinsky
slyly and humorously demystifies the myths of Europe, using French
jokes about Belgians to show that Belgium exemplifies what Europe
has always been. As a Belgian living in France, he responds to typical
French jokes about Belgians by making a Belgian the emblematic
figure for Europe and painting him over a map of France, acknowl-
edging too that Belgium has often been part of the same territory as
France. All of these histories overlap within Alechinsky’s map; none
of them has been eradicated. Their ghosts remain in this quintes-
sential European’s imagination.

45. Pierre Alechinsky, Page d’atlas universel (VII) (1984). © Pierre Alechinsky.
The second map-painting to feature a version of the Gilles from

Binche in fact includes two of them. It originated as a map of Al-
exander’s empire (see fig. 45). One giant figure parades across the
space, his left foot firmly placed on the shoulder of another. Both
kingly figures, like the multiple Gilles from Binche, wear elaborate
feathered headdresses. The first one’s legs stretch from Africa to
Europe, his headdress curling over the Black Sea. He reaches down
to help a small hybrid creature, who looks like a child in a robe with
a bent bird’s head, as it struggles up some steps. The large walking
figure’s apparently bare feet step on what looks like the ermine cape
surrounding the shoulders of the other mustachioed Gilles, situated
in the lower right-hand corner. Anchored in Africa, this second
Gilles’s headdress spikes northward across Russia.
In this seventh map of the series, the strong walking figure bending
down from Europe helps a vulnerable creature take its first steps in
the direction of either Western Europe or North America. His power

46. Pierre Alechinsky, Page d’atlas universel (X) (1984). © Pierre Alechinsky.
seems to rely on that of an emperor from the old world of Africa,

whose elaborate cloak and headdress outstrip his own, but whose
function seems to be to hold him up, like the African mineral riches
imperial Europe appropriated to support and build its empires. The
Gilles’s transformational symbolism reminds the viewer that even
great monarchs like Alexander are kings only in their own day, if not
simply for one day, and, in a measure of time, they will be replaced.
One king, one continent, one generation relays another, becomes the
stepping-stone for another. The Gilles represents the permanence of
such cycles, emblematized by the Alechinskyan spiral, in opposition
to the more fixed worldview inherent in the very creation of these
maps, celebrating as they do the universal dominance of France.
The third and final map to feature a Gilles, the last one in the
sequence, focuses on the southern French cities of Marseille and
Lyon (see fig. 46). This meditative Gilles fills the space. He is painted
face forward, his feathered headdress curling up and out across

the entire upper portion of the painting. His face is covered with
crosshatching, suggesting skin darkened by the Mediterranean sun,
while his hunched shoulders curve protectively with clawlike hands
around a book, on which scrawling ink simulates writing. The book,
which inspires his meditation, is linked to this geographic location
as a source of literary culture, centered in the middle of the map,
where boxes of the city maps are located. The Gilles is not reading:
in stillness he stares into space toward Eastern Europe, the place of
origin of Alechinsky’s father.
For this Gilles figure, southern France is an open book, so fa-
miliar he does not need to read the words. The expression of the
eyes conveys a world-weariness that suggests there are no surprises
left in these ancient cities founded by the Greeks and Romans. This
face is more recognizably human than in the two previous versions
and seems older. What more could a character born out of a Bel-
gian Renaissance festival have to learn from the French past? His
territory, much more than that of France, has been fought over for
centuries, belonging first to one monarch and then another. Even
in the twenty-first century Belgium is a country divided by cultures
and languages, a country that played a central role in the triggering
of the two world wars. From which direction might novelty come:
the East, toward which he gazes, or the West, away from which he
is turned?
Read as a sort of graphic novel, Alechinsky’s paintings on the
pages of this French atlas tell a legible story that is partly about the
persistence of the medieval Gilles character into the modern day,
a working-class, non-French European man disguised as a non-
European monarch, who, as Europe evolves, increasingly holds center
stage. This character reflects Alechinsky’s personal perspective as a
resident outsider on these French maps. They create a legible narra-
tive: we see the hybrid creatures and childlike style as at once an allu-
sion to the midcentury Cobra movement and to what Cobra sought
to evoke: the discovery of “an interior writing leading to an organic
discovery of the self,” as Alechinsky put it in his 1951 essay on paint-

ing, or the natural urge to paint and draw (directly from feeling) “an
animal, a night, a scream, a human being,” to quote again from the
Cobra “Manifesto” (Alechinsky, “Abstraction” 5; Nieuwenhuys 30).
Never forget the past, Alechinsky seems to be warning us with
his palimpsests. Never forget that on the personal level our first at-
tempts to make our mark were visual: those drawings of families,
houses, animals, and plants saved by a parent in drawers and then
overlaid by our later school essays. Those first drawings were often
freer, more spontaneous. On a communal level, the ghosts of our
common past underlie our educated present; our rationalist heritage
may be overdrawn with spontaneously playful images that contain
within them the transformative energy of ancient figures and nonra-
tional superstitions and beliefs. As Europe navigates into the future,
Alechinsky’s maps suggest, the remapping of human geography can
involve as much renewal as loss. An everyman can become a Gilles
during carnival, if he was born in Binche; the past, however ghostly
as it floats beneath the present, may always be usefully reread as we
move forward and remain hopefully open to the new understanding
that recycling may bring.
These works refer back in multiple ways to Alechinsky’s forma-
tive time in the Cobra movement, his Belgian childhood, his French
place of residence, the pull of North America, and his surrealist
connection. We may also see in his wandering brush’s deliberation
and spontaneity echoes of surrealist automatic listening, writing, and
drawing, which in turn echo the spiritualist seeking for evanescent,
nonrational truths.
He was thirty-two years younger than Breton, yet Breton’s dis-
covery of Central Park sparked an intense connection that threads
through Alechinsky’s writings and narrates the time they spent
together, walking the streets of Paris (see Alechinsky, Roue). Ale-
chinsky’s intellectual dialogue with Cobra and surrealism resonates
in these works, just as they confirm the persistence of surrealist
practices as well as the irrepressible ghost of spiritualism that haunt
these practices so evident in the receptivity to ghostly manifesta-

tions — those apparitions from the past that persist in the present
and are as historical as they are personal.
The alternating moods of these ink paintings, filled with decisions
made at the tip of a brush, parallel the twists and turns of the poetical
structures that emerged from the mouth of Desnos and the pens of
Breton and Soupault as they spoke and wrote the first examples of
surrealist automatism in The Magnetic Fields. Alechinsky’s embrace
of Breton confirms surrealism as one of the ghostly layers of his
European palimpsests, just as he confirms the ghostliness in Breton’s
artistic vision. Alechinsky’s maps allow us to read surrealism in a
new light, as a movement that continues to draw artists backward
toward its origins at the same time as it propels them forward to-
ward the future, in spiral fashion. Alechinsky awakens the ghost
of surrealism in his work and brings it back to life, lifting it out of
time into an ever-turning present, as spirited as a spritely Gilles. His
work reinforces three aspects of surrealist ghostliness: the histori-
cal ghost of spiritualism in the ghosts from the past that he evokes
and invokes — most specifically the monk Sengaï and the historical
characters he plays with in the Page d’atlas universel; his method of
working, the process he eloquently describes in his writings so vividly
visible on his paper and canvas works, which involves the rhythm
and flow of automatism matched in the Cobra tradition by prepara-
tion and spontaneity; and the quintessential doubleness of surrealist
ghostliness inherent in the coexisting realities of chronological and
universal time, which Alechinsky also brings to life in his paintings
on the nineteenth-century atlas, whereby the past is always present
as much as it is past, present in the attuned artist’s willingness to
remain receptive to Bretonian experience (Foucault, Aesthetics 173).
Indeed in his 1951 essay on painting, Alechinsky insisted that the
painting is “a terrain of experience, it is not a screen behind which
one may hide” (“Abstraction” 5, my translation). A painting exposes
a painter, revealing everything about the experience of painting.
Just as Alechinsky creates a personal psychic geography, Susan
Hiller creates a personal and universal psychic geography with her

collection of displayed objects. It is remarkable how strongly the
ghost of automatism persists in haunting these works, nonetheless
mapping out connections to Bretonian and Desnosian surrealism
through the persistence of a creative process that marries production
with receptivity, movement with stillness, and external, chronological
reality with internal, iterative psychic continuities.

8 Susan Hiller’s Freudian Ghosts
The repressed within modernism is automatism.

Susan Hiller, speech at West Dean College, 2005
Susan Hiller’s From the Freud Museum (1991–97) activates the archival
dimension of surrealist ghostliness, which is made of two coexisting
oppositional forces — one retrospective, one anticipatory — that pivot
on an oscillating present moment.1 The pre– and post–World War
II time periods brought together by the placement of Hiller’s work
in Freud’s London house interrupt chronological time the way any
archive does, looking backward and forward in time in an impossible
contradiction, capturing the past as it slips away as vividly as a pho-
tograph in an insistently present moment. She connects ghostliness
with Freud’s thought so that the forces typical of the archive may be
understood in Freudian terms as motivated by the death principle,
on the one hand, and by the life-affirming pleasure principle, on the
other. Hiller’s postmodern collection of trash and tourist objects of
little monetary value is emblematic of her feminist cold war gen-
erational concerns. Presented in archival boxes in the vitrines that
line the walls of what was once Freud’s bedroom, it evokes Freud’s
modernist collection of valuable ancient objects, true to his modern-
ist interwar aesthetic. At the same time, Hiller’s collection works in
opposition to Freud’s and simultaneously crystallizes the symbolic
value of all collections.
201
47. Susan Hiller, From the Freud Museum (1991–97). The first version of
the work as installed at the Freud Museum, London, 1994. © Susan Hiller.
Collection Tate, London.
With the creation of From the Freud Museum for the installation
inaugurated in 1994 at Freud’s house museum in London (originally
titled At the Freud Museum), Hiller consolidated the relationship
with surrealism she had begun in the 1970s with her automatic writ-
ing experiments (see fig. 47). As each collection reflects a historical
period refracted onto each other in that house, we see how our own
early twenty-first-century sensibility remains interconnected with
historical forces out of our control, an embodiment of surrealist
ghostliness. Like Alechinsky’s 1980s paintings on nineteenth-century
maps, Hiller’s installation from the 1990s similarly intersects a social
dimension with an intensely personal one and sums up the human
ways in which we continuously reassess the past in our evaluation
of the present and our projection of ourselves into the future.
Hiller’s display of boxes transforms her viewers into Freudian
subjects, bringing out in us a deep, perhaps unconscious response
to her demonstration of how the chance encounter with things can

be self-revealing. From the Freud Museum crystallizes key aspects
of surrealist thought about automatism, the way objects material-
ize dreams, and the psychoanalytic function of found and made
objects. Thus surrealist ghostliness refers to that aspect of human
nature explored in depth by the surrealists that always makes out of
one life a double life, our rational minds haunted by memory, our
unconscious awareness of mortality, and the ways these psychic
forces inform and enrich our lives, making us all into dreamers.
In this final chapter I explore Hiller’s automatic creative process,
her conscious use of ghostliness, and how she closed the twentieth
century with references to surrealism’s repressed spiritualist ghost
with a postmodern reconsideration of surrealism as Freudian.
From Anthropology to Automatism and Art

Born in Florida, Hiller moved to London after graduate study in
anthropology at Tulane University and fieldwork in Central America.
In the foreword to The Myth of Primitivism (1991) she explains, “A
long time ago, when I was doing postgraduate work in anthropology,
I was so intensely moved by the images I saw during a slide lecture
on African art that I decided to become an artist” (1–2). Staring in
the early 1970s, she began creating art that allowed her “to show
what we don’t know that we know.”
In May 1972, while on a visit to France, Hiller practiced automatic
writing for the first time, later producing a work and an artist’s book
based on the “scripts” she had written. The title, Sisters of Menon,
is a reference to the voices that spoke through her: “Suddenly, I
started to write and write and write” (in S. Morgan 39).2 At first she
thought of this writing only as a form of drawing, as she focused on
the visual or figurative aspects of the exaggerated handwriting. Then,
after losing and recovering the manuscripts so that they became like
spiritualist revenants — material traces of lost voices returned from
the past into the present, like ghosts (whose material traces took
the form of handwriting) — she studied the writing itself, annotated
it, and published the project in 1983 (Betterton in Lingwood 18).
Susan Hiller’s Freudian Ghosts 203

Producing Sisters of Menon was closer to a spiritualist than a sur-
realist automatic experience since Hiller distinctly heard “a trio of
female voices.” At the same time, her interpretation of the origin of
the voices was surrealistic because she located them within herself:
“‘My’ hands made the marks that form the inscriptions, but not in my
characteristic handwriting or voice. My ‘self ’ is a locus for thoughts,
feelings, sensations, but not an impermeable, corporeal boundary”
(in Brett 22). In true surrealist form, Hiller turns her preoccupation
with the “origin” of the voices to a consideration of “the nature of
present reality and the multiple composition of the self.” “What is
the ‘me’?” she asks. “Where are one’s edges and limits?” (22).3 In
this way she articulates surrealist ghostliness more explicitly than
any artist before her, for she explicitly identifies the experience of
automatic practice as being fundamentally ghostly.
In an interview with Stuart Morgan Hiller explained that the
experience of writing Sisters of Menon made her interested in art
“in a different way”: “I could see all the trajectories through Mod-
ernism that had been considered unacceptable. You know, Surreal-
ism was like a dirty word” (in S. Morgan 42–43).4 In her interview
with Roger Malbert at West Dean College in 2005, she added the
thought that “the return of content in art has its historical roots in
surrealist practice” (6). In effect, Hiller extends the ways surrealism
was opened up by women like Claude Cahun, Lee Miller, Dorothea
Tanning, and Francesca Woodman, who claimed surrealism for
themselves, by bringing her feminist sensibility (born in her study
of anthropology) to surrealism.5 Lucy Lippard sees Hiller as the
“heiress” to the surrealists, and in Hiller’s automatic writing she
finds the final reversal of the appropriation of femininity by the first
male surrealists: “Automatic writing, in which unfamiliar signs rise
to the surface of consciousness, is a metaphor for the unarticulated
or unintelligible speech of women. Hiller has made it a reversible
ground, both negative and positive, white on black and black on
white, something that can be done by everyone and an intensely
subjective experience” (in Einzig xv, xiv).6

“We All Live inside the Freud Museum”
Hiller’s interest in anthropological studies of other cultures became
an exploration of her own culture as refracted through the ghosts of
the past contained within her cultural memory.7 She thus embraces
the surrealistically equalizing approach to ethnography advocated
by Brassaï. She comes to ghostliness through her belief that “our
lives are haunted by ghosts”: “I mean our own personal ghosts and
collective social ghosts” (Malbert 14). She is drawn to objects that
speak to her as though there were a preexisting connection between
them. From the Freud Museum began as At the Freud Museum when
Hiller received an invitation to create an installation for Freud’s
house in London, his last residence after leaving Vienna in the late
1930s. Freud’s room in the front of the house on the second floor
has two facing walls lined with vitrines: “This location would help
me to finish the piece of work that had begun long ago in my mind
and which I thought might go on for ever” (in Einzig 226). The work
consists of rows of archaeological archive boxes displayed in the lit
vitrines, with the lids lifted to reveal the objects and photocopied
texts and images inside.
The ancient world that fascinated Freud, prompting him to collect
objects from lands bordering the Mediterranean Basin, coordinates
with Hiller’s fascination for the same ancient European world, to-
gether with the ancient world of the North American continent of
her birth. From the Freud Museum also examines Hiller’s and Freud’s
shared Jewish heritage through her juxtaposition of responses to
war from their two generations, the two world wars and the cold
war. Hiller studies Freud’s psychic geography as it intersects her
own. In the mimetic gesture of collecting and displaying objects of
meaning to her, she also shows the power of collecting for her and
Freud, how collected objects can constitute an archive of thought
through their ongoing ghostly link to the landscapes and contexts
that produced them, and how objects, crystallizing desires, reflect
back to the collector latent elements of the self.

The original public version of At the Freud Museum, installed in
1994, consisted of twenty-two boxes; this evolved into a collection
of twenty-seven boxes for the 1995 book After the Freud Museum,
and then into a work with fifty boxes when, having acquired the
new title From the Freud Museum, the installation was bought by
the Tate Modern Museum in 1998.8 Each box has a number, a title,
and, in the book, an explanation equivalent to a scientific annota-
tion. In an interview in 1998, Hiller described the work: “[It is] a
very big museum of objects I’ve collected in the way everybody keeps
little worthless things in a box or a drawer. I’ve taken a lot of these
things and examined them very closely, tried to look at them, in
the tradition of Freud, as having meaning. I’ve put each object into
a separate little frame or container, a cardboard box” (in Keneally
56–57). Her preference, as she explains, was for the kinds of archival
“archaeological collecting boxes” used on digs: “They put all the
things they find in the boxes without discriminating or sorting, that
all takes place later, and that’s what I’ve done with these objects. . . .
Some objects are very bizarre and strange and funny, some are very
frightening” (57).
“I think we all live inside the Freud Museum,” Hiller told Malbert.
It is “a cultural concept we can’t really escape” (17). In her preface
to the guidebook to the London Freud Museum, Marina Warner
confirms this idea: “Sigmund Freud shaped the twentieth-century
idea of what a person is; we would not recognize ourselves without
him” (in Davies ix). Yet Hiller contrasts her own collection with
Freud’s:
Freud had beautiful, classic objects which although not immensely
expensive at the time he bought them, were still rare and valuable
enough. Everything in my collection is either something that’s
been thrown away or is rubbish, of no value. . . . So immediately I
could say that Freud is an early modernist with antiquarian taste
and my collection is obviously very postmodern — fragments and
ruins and discards, appropriations, etc. . . . The objects I have

collected are constant evocations of mortality and death, which
of course could also be said of Freud’s collection and perhaps in
all collections. (“Working” 228)
Every object found, classified, annotated, and presented by Hiller
has an animated aspect for her that is amplified by its link to Freud’s
house, where they were first exhibited. This amplification comes
partly from the “hauntedness” she attributes to the house (“Work-
ing” 227). To her, it feels haunted by Freud, by the legacy of psy-
choanalysis — the science with which Freud sought to exorcise the
ghosts that haunted his patients — and by the objects he collected,
many of which were funerary objects connected to previous times
and people. At the Freud Museum crystallizes and condenses these
ghostly effects, linking Hiller’s found and assembled objects to sur-
realist objects with their psychoanalytic function, their latencies,
and to dada objects, found things transformed into art by chance.
Since the creation of readymades by Duchamp, dada and surreal-
ist objects have been characterized by their being turned away from
an original function, whose ghost nevertheless remains embedded
in them (Breton, “Crise”). Duchamp chose objects distinguished by
a modernist simplicity, such as his Bottlerack, so that seeing them
as beautiful was not difficult. Hiller’s process resembles that of Du-
champ. Both artists invite the viewer to consider the turns taken in
the lifespan of their recycled objects — from the hardware store or
town dump to the gallery — and rely on the viewer’s interactive per-
ceptions to complete the work and to recognize how social contexts
affect how we look at it. But Hiller’s sensibility is more postmodern
than Duchamp’s, because her objects lack modernist beauty; they are
visibly trash objects of little or no value, like the discarded bus tickets
in Brassaï and Dalí’s Involuntary Sculptures. Also like Involuntary
Sculptures they have been visibly handled and thus reflect Tzara’s
belief that love for objects stems from an intrauterine, “prenatal
memory” and from tactile sensations “tied to the satisfactions offered
by substances that can be touched, licked, sucked, crunched, eaten,

applied to the skin or the eyelid, warm, dark, damp substances”
(“Concerning” 209).
Hiller’s collection of discarded things reflects a postmodernist
sense that the reassuring totality evident in the omniscient narrative
voices in nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century fictions
had been rendered impossible by the devastation of World War II,
a perspective also found in Alechinsky’s drawings on nineteenth-
century maps.9 It constitutes a “reconfiguration of the archive,” writes
Anne Kirker, “disrupting categories and fixed judgments, which
therefore also destabilizes the experience of history as a stable order”
(61). Hiller demonstrates this destabilization and the impossibility
of totality as it is reflected in postmodern fiction by adding an infu-
sion of ghostliness to her self-conscious recycling of discarded frag-
ments. She “strives to restore psychoanalysis to its darker, devalued,
repressed roots in myth and storytelling, and even animism and the
paranormal,” explains Alexandra Kokoli (119).
Hiller’s recycling linked to specific psychic geographies recalls
Alechinsky’s use of maps. Her found things speak to her about herself;
they fulfill the surrealist idea that objects can clarify the universe and
play a psychoanalytical role in our lives. She situates the “history of
automatism within European and American art” in both personal and
social terms, concentrating on the way it dissolves “your boundaries
as a person, and makes you think about the fact that anyone can do
it, that ideas are collective” (in Woods 69). The fragments and bits
and pieces of lived experience to which she refers are crystallized in
the objects she collects and displays in rows of boxes that interrelate
syntactically, as in a sentence.10 In this way they may communicate
to others the insights they released in her.
The recognition that objects external to ourselves can trigger
insights was described poetically by Breton in “The Automatic Mes-
sage” (roughly sixty years before Hiller first displayed At the Freud
Museum) as the desire to “dip blindly into one’s subjective treasures
simply for the pleasure of scattering on the sand a handful of shim-
mering seaweed and emeralds” (Break 125–26, translation modified).

It is a question of bringing something buried up to the surface. He
had already compared the unconscious and automatism to a body
of water traversed by mysterious currents, “strange forces” emanat-
ing from “the depths of our minds” that are capable of “augmenting
those [forces] on the surface” (Manifestoes 10). Water works in both
texts as the medium that hides and reveals the desired object. From
“forces” to “treasures” mixed with seaweed, Breton identifies psychic
details with “treasures,” like precious objects that we carry within us
and that external objects can help us to understand. Hiller pursues
this objective by focusing on how the process of placing each object
in position is “very dreamlike,” which, by association, involves the
erratic motion of dreamtime (“Working” 227). “I’m again using the
notion of dream in several senses. If you think of Freud’s notion of the
dream as a narrative that had both a manifest and a hidden content,
this might have something to do with the relationship between the
story told by the story-teller and the story that was being heard. I
tried to make my boxes exemplify that kind of approach” (227). Part
of Hiller’s story is created in the viewer’s mind the way that part of
the sense of Desnos’s “Rrose Sélavy” poems comes from the echo
of the alternate, ghost poem to which the puns gesture.
The notion of something hidden that may slowly emerge through
a process like psychoanalysis or automatism is presented in the paral-
lel process of collection, classification, and analysis of found objects
in the box Hiller has titled Occult (025).11 This collection of masks
bought in tourist shops of diverse origin — Chinese, Tibetan, African,
and perhaps Venetian but made in China — is displayed with a text
that summarizes a Winnebago medicine rite.12 The story centers on
a mythical Hare who “invents art, music, medicine, agriculture and
hunting as consolation” for his discovery of “the existence of death.”
He invents an activity that Freud describes in Totem and Taboo as the
function of art in human experience: “Only in art does it still happen
that a man who is consumed by desires performs something resem-
bling the accomplishment of those desires and that what he does in
play produces emotional effects — thanks to artistic illusion — just

as though it were something real. People speak with justice of the
‘magic of art’ and compare artists to magicians” (Totem 113).
Hiller uses objects to explore the world of her generation, which
grew up being familiar with Freud’s theories. With her collection she
follows Freud’s analysis, from Totem and Taboo, of the relationship
between the visible and the hidden, consciousness and the uncon-
scious. According to Freud:
When we, no less than the primitive man, project something into
external reality, what is happening must surely be this: we are
recognizing the existence of two states — one in which something
is directly given to the senses and to consciousness (that is, is pres-
ent to them), and alongside it another, in which the same thing is
latent but capable of re-appearing. In short, we are recognizing
the co-existence of perception and memory, or, putting it more
generally, the existence of unconscious mental processes alongside
the conscious ones. It might be said that in the last analysis the
“spirit” of the persons or things comes down to their capacity
to be remembered and imagined after perception of them has
ceased. (Totem 117)
In a gesture reminiscent of Breton’s metaphor of psychic “forces”
as water currents, Hiller represents the past, surfacing vertically
into the present in the form of memory, by means of real water she
collected from historic sources in Greece and Ireland in order to
symbolize the move from the earth’s depths to the surface. In the box
titled Virgula Divina (005), Hiller shows douser’s equipment with
a photocopy of her notes on Thomas Charles Lethbridge, a British
archaeologist. In a way she compares the work of an archaeologist to
that of a douser, both diggers of buried treasures who mix science,
mystery, method, and magic. Although the archaeologist may have
more social legitimacy and the douser’s knowledge may fall more
squarely under the rubric of folklore, Hiller puts them on an even
footing, in a leveling gesture typical of dada and surrealist precedents
for mixing high and low culture.13

The box with the title Hades (015) holds only one vial containing
water from the river Acheron, where the entry to the Underworld
is situated. She adds a photocopy of a picture of a big, dilapidated
sign erected next to the river in recent times. Hades answers the
earlier box Ενχη (prayer; 002), in which Hiller shows ancient shards
and a contemporary piece of marble collected near the place where
Aeneas moved away from the spring waters — supposedly having
descended here into the Underworld. She also presents tesserae she
picked up off the ground at the site and places them beneath a map
of Greece, the source for many of Freud’s mythological models for
the psyche, such as the Oedipus complex, and the geographic place
of origin for several objects in his personal collection.14 The “Greeks
mapped the world in such a way that we still can’t find a different
map of consciousness to transcend that,” she comments (in Woods
70).
48. Susan Hiller, From the

Freud Museum (1991–97).
© Susan Hiller. Collection
Tate, London.

Hiller’s boxes materialize literally Breton’s image of the uncon-
scious mind as a body of water traversed by mysterious currents and
the wealth of myths that spring from the unconscious and nourish
our conscious thoughts. For example, the third box in this sequence,
with the title Eaux-de-vie (011), contains vials of water from Lethe
and Mnemosyne, the rivers of forgetting and remembering, loca-
tions of psychic significance for everyone who has been influenced
by Freud’s thought. The water of Lethe must not be drunk without
immediately drinking the water of Mnemosyne. Hiller’s title, a refer-
ence to French distilled liquor and the literal meaning “life water,”
evokes the power of alcohol to transport us even when we stay in the
same place, a doubling experience akin to the unconscious, the way a
person who believes unquestioningly in the magical powers of these
rivers might feel transported into forgetting and remembering. Are
we not all to some extent believers in these founding myths, Hiller
seems to be asking.
Psychic Geographies: From the Freudian Mystic

Writing Pad to the Derridean Archive
While Hiller acknowledges surrealist practice in her explicit defense
of surrealist automatism, in From the Freud Museum she turns to
Freud to show how geographic, historic, and psychic maps coincide
in human consciousness: “A lot of the places I have documented
or evoked in this collection are mythic and in that sense part of
our collective psychic map, the map of our notion of conscious-
ness” (“Working” 241). Freud also used collection to map human
consciousness. First and foremost he collected patients’ dreams,
initially “despised and neglected” objects, like Hiller’s, which he then
transformed through psychoanalysis into “precious things,” bring-
ing “covert objects of shame into a public world of objects,” as John
Forrester explains (240). Psychoanalysis also transformed them into
a kind of archive of his thought. His acts of transformation mimic a
writer’s art and parallel Hiller’s acts of artistic conversion, her rescue
of things from the garbage dump to a place in the art gallery. Freud

does this by recognizing and categorizing — archiving — the value
of psychic objects, an archive Hiller replicates in three dimensions.
Like Hiller, Freud in his analyses paid attention to “the trivial detail
of the life of everyday objects,” turning them into “typical modernist
objects — the ready-made, the found object, the bit of detritus . . . the
surrealist celebration of the transvaluation of all values” (Forrester
241). Freud’s organizing of his patients’ dreams made them resemble
his collection of ancient vases and statues, a comparison noted by one
of his well-known patients, the poet Hilda Doolittle, known as H.D.:
Thoughts were things, to be collected, collated, analysed, shelved
or resolved. Fragmentary ideas, apparently unrelated, were often
found to be part of a special layer or stratum of thought and
memory, therefore to belong together; these were sometimes
skillfully pieced together like the exquisite Greek tear-jars and
iridescent glass blows and vases that gleamed in the dusk from the
shelves of the cabinet that faced me where I stretched, propped
up on the couch in the room in Berggasse 19, Wien IX. The dead
were living in so far as they lived in memory or were recalled in
dream. (In Forrester 238)
The two types of objects evoked by Doolittle have other similari-
ties: they were created by human experience, namely the psyche and
hands; they had been buried in the unconscious or in the earth; and
they had been found by an archaeological method, either ephemeral
or material. Both types of objects are haunted by death, the past, and
the ghosts who survive in us. Certainly Freud’s personal collection
was marked by funerary objects, including his Egyptian mummy
portrait, a funeral mask, and a reliquary in the shape of a falcon (see
note 14). After his father died in 1890 Freud began to collect these
objects linked to death, a symptom of what Derrida called “archive
fever” in a lecture delivered at the Freud Museum six weeks before
Hiller’s opening. Derrida explains that the archival impulse generates
a fever because it occurs at the nexus of the “transaction between
this death drive and the pleasure principle, between Thanatos and

Eros” (Archive 12). It is the tendency of the archive to work always
“against itself ” that animates the fever in his formulation (11–12).15
In his lecture Derrida explains that the archive’s ghost emerges
from the impossible desire to fix a definitive moment of beginning
(the word archive comes from the Greek for commencement), despite
all the creation myths ever invented, without the death drive getting
activated at the same time. The archive thus emerges out of conflict-
ing desires: the acceptance of mortality connected to the impetus to
leave behind a record for posterity doubled by the imperative to live.
As a result, the archive must be visualized as an oscillating figure,
caught in a suspended present moment situated indefinitely between
the past and the future. “‘Archive’ is only a notion,” writes Derrida.
“We only have an impression, an insistent impression through the
unstable feeling of a shifting figure. . . . And this disjointedness has
a necessary relationship with the structure of archivization” (Archive
29).
“Working through Objects” was the lecture Hiller gave to inau-
gurate At the Freud Museum, in the same space where Derrida gave
his talk “Archive Fever” six weeks earlier. She presents her instal-
lation, with its “disjointed” archival structure based on Freudian
free association, in a way that articulates a parallel tension between
the death drive and the life force, comparing Freud’s collection to
her personalized archive of things found and given new life by her
discovery of them:
The decision that Freud made [was] to place all of his objects
in his working space, to create an ambiance that was very dif-
ferent from the domestic setting, so that everything he looked
at in his office and consulting room was basically from a tomb,
connected with a dead body or a vanished civilization. . . . Well,
I think for me it would be a very difficult situation to try to work
at a desk cluttered with these immensely resonant and haunted
objects, and yet I realize I am doing the same thing in my own
way. (“Working” 229)

Hiller’s personal and lively collection of objects from a forgotten past
could serve as a model for Derrida’s idea of the archive as a “shifting
figure” that exists always in the present, caught between the human
desire to remain alive and the pull of the death drive. It also serves
as a model for Freud’s “Mystic Writing Pad,” which Derrida analyzes
in Archive Fever, just as the ordinariness of Hiller’s collected things
embody surrealist ghostliness through their materialization of the
awareness of mortality that unconsciously haunts us as we move
forward in our everyday lives.
For Derrida, the psychological dimension of the archival impulse
is paramount.16 “The theory of psychoanalysis, then, becomes a
theory of the archive and not only a theory of memory,” he explains,
because psychoanalysis, like the archival impulse, involves writing
(Archive 19). In Archive Fever he turns to Freud’s model of the “Mystic
Writing Pad,” Freud’s name for the “concrete representation of . . .
the functioning of the perceptual apparatus of our mind: “Imag-
ine one hand writing upon the surface of the Mystic Writing Pad
while another periodically raises its covering sheet from the wax
slab” (“Note” 212). Derrida compares Freud’s two-stage model of
the imprinting and erasing of unconscious memory to the mobility
of the archive. “I showed that the perceptive apparatus of our mind
consists of two layers,” explains Freud, “of an external protective
shield against stimuli whose task it is to diminish the strength of
excitations coming in, and of a surface behind it which receives the
stimuli” (210). It is, Freud continues, “a writing-tablet from which
notes can be erased by an easy movement of the hand — a slab of
dark brown resin or wax with a paper edging; over the slab is laid a
thin transparent sheet” (209).
The stimuli Freud sees converging on the writing pad is, for Der-
rida, a “problematic of the impression, that is of the inscription,
which leaves a mark right on the substrate” (Archive 27). Derrida links
this impression to what he calls the “archive desire or fever” because
it simultaneously opens onto the “future” — that anticipated moment
of revelation — while retaining ties to the past and the knowledge

associated with that past life; as for memory, it stands poised to act in
the ever-fluctuating present (29–30). With the writing pad metaphor
Freud represents how the present contains the past while anticipating
the future through memory. It is a psychological explanation of the
experience of doubleness at the root of surrealist ghostliness, rooted
in Freud’s model of our dual minds, divided between conscious and
unconscious realities.
Freud’s description of the sheet that covers the wax slab serves as
a metaphor for the unconscious mind marked by the perceptions
that imprint themselves more lightly on waking consciousness. The
shiny protective celluloid sheet filters perceptions inscribed onto
the wax slab of the unconscious. It operates like an intermediary
layer between the stimuli and their fragmentary inscription on the
unconscious mind. Knowing that an invisible layer below the sheet
contains myriad inscriptions haunts us, like ghosts of disavowed
impressions. If we compare the objects in Hiller’s boxes — both trash
fragments and idiosyncratically precious things — to the fragmentary
impressions left on Freud’s wax slab of the unconscious, and if we
compare the vitrines through which the viewer sees Hiller’s objects
to the celluloid sheet of the Mystic Writing Pad, then we may under-
stand how she invites her viewers to imagine that lost perceptions
imprinted on the inner wax slabs of the unconscious mind, buried
traces, might be triggered if not fully retrieved by viewing her objects
because of their resemblance to found things that were once clearly
lost. While Hiller’s objects cannot be the same as the ones touched,
collected, and lost by the viewer, or like the traces of perceptions
imprinted in his or her unconscious mind, the fragmentary nature
of these objects and their obvious connection to a larger landscape
linked to a shared cosmopolitan culture make them structurally
similar, only in three-dimensional form.
That the boxes are archaeological reminds us of the archaeologi-
cal structure of Freud’s use of the metaphor of the writing pad for
the working of the unconscious and of his archaeological interests,
both in the objects he collected and in his psychoanalytical method

of digging for buried detritus and treasure within the dreams and
memories of his patients’ minds. In his notes written after each ana-
lytic session he reconstructs the landscapes of his patients’ psychic
geographies by linking bits and pieces retrieved from their free-form
narratives with his knowledge of ancient Greek myths and, more
tellingly, with the presence before him of the statues that stood in
a row on his desk, with Athena at the center. Freud takes the “de-
spised and neglected” objects served up by his patients’ dreams and
memories and turns them into treasure by associating them with
those mythical stories (such as the stories of Oedipus and Electra)
capable of offering solace, if not a cure, for their ills. He orients these
stories with his understanding of the objects on his desk, all of which
have been dug up from sand and dirt in archaeological digs. Hiller
makes comparable narrative sense out of the fragments and objects
she has collected, many also picked up from the ground and dug up
from dirt, by arranging them in syntactical rows that, though not
as directly legible as Freud’s clarifying essays, also tell stories and,
like Freud’s analyses, call for a response. Her story, told in a three-
dimensional format, asks us to consider similarly ghostly bits and
pieces retrieved from the depths of our own unconscious substrate,
which have their corollaries in the objects we keep in our drawers
and on our shelves.
Hiller makes her viewers lean forward and peer through the glass,
forcing them to remain aware of the act of seeing through. Close
examination of her boxes, models for the precious and mysterious
things that lie buried not only in Hiller’s unconscious but structurally
in the unconscious in general, reveals that while displayed open, these
boxes could also be closed, hiding their contents from view, like most
perceptions imprinted onto the wax slab of the unconscious mind
in Freud’s metaphor. Through these objects she meditates explicitly
on the links between herself and Freud:
Whatever might be said to be the “collection” on display in the
Freud Museum is complicated by an overlay of settings where

historical, biographical, archaeological, familial, personal, ethno-
graphic and psychoanalytic facts merge to produce representations
whose meanings are always in flux.
Freud’s impressive collection of art and artifacts can be seen as
an archive of the version of civilization’s heritage he was claiming;
my collection is more like an index to some of the sites of conflict
and disruption that complicate any such notion of heritage. (After
n.p.)
Shared psychic geographies provide common ground for Hiller’s
comparison of herself and Freud and of their collecting practices. In
addition to their shared interest in ancient Greece and its ancient and
modern artifacts, there is their shared Jewish identity. In the ninth
box, titled Führer, for instance, she displays a German book on Jewish
history and literature from 1935, which she found partially burned
in a London dumpster. She explains in the commentary published
in After the Freud Museum that her title, Führer, the German word
for “guide” or “leader,” refers to an ironic and doubtless deliberate
use of the word in the book’s introduction, “May this book be a good
guide for you on the paths of life,” referring implicitly to “the bad
guide” who used the title Führer.
With the use of photocopies of photographs Hiller creates a spec-
tral and valued place for mechanical reproductions. “I was very put
off in the seventies,” she tells Woods, “by the way particular readings
of ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ were
used to censor artists’ production” (57). Her quarrel is not with Ben-
jamin but with the (mis)uses of his theory in the art world. Instead
the obvious handling involved in assembling postindustrial objects,
trash, and photocopies and making them into art the way Hiller does,
after Duchamp and also Man Ray, Brassaï, and Dalí, turns them
away from their original function and reinvests them with magical
cult value or “aura,” the loss of which Benjamin had ambivalently
marked in the age of mechanical reproduction. Benjamin certainly
affirms the conjuring abilities of objects for a collector in “Unpacking

My Library,” where he describes how the handling of such objects
as beloved books (also mechanically reproduced objects, whose
aggregation produces a personal archive) may trigger dreamlike
psychic journeys backward and forward in time (Illuminations 61).
His books, like Hiller’s fragments, contain memories and narratives
capable of restituting entire ghostly landscapes within the imagina-
tion as though they had been retrieved from the wax slab of Freud’s
Mystic Writing Pad and reconstituted. Hiller embraces Benjamin
as “a kind poet, who loved film, loved photography.” “In my Freud
piece,” she continues in her interview with Woods, “I’ve taken his
distinction between souvenirs and relics as a basic underpinning.
I wanted to feature him in a major way” (57). She embraces the
distinction between originals and copies, in other words, and then
blurs it by reinvesting the copies — literally, not just photocopies
but also cheap souvenir reproductions — with Benjaminian “aura”
through her handling of them and investment of psychic creative
energy into them.
The third box linking Hiller’s and Freud’s shared Jewish heritage,
the penultimate one (27), has the title Relequia (relic) and features a
prominent quotation from Benjamin (see fig. 49). With the title and
the inclusion of a cheap souvenir from Soviet-occupied Germany
she argues for the valid nonhierarchical coexistence of disparately
valued objects in a postmodern world. The quotation comes from
Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” the last text he
wrote before fleeing German-occupied France, a flight that ended
in his suicide just over the French-Spanish border at Port Bou: “To
articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it ‘the way
it really was.’ It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes by at
a moment of danger” (Illuminations 255). Benjamin’s emphasis on
the present moment conforms to Derrida’s understanding of the
archival impulse and the way Hiller’s display of objects impulsively
picked up from the ground, retrieved from dumpsters, or discovered
in flea markets or souvenir shops concentrates on the presentness of
these things. Derrida’s notion of archive fever similarly concentrates

49. Susan Hiller, From the Freud Museum (1991–97). © Susan Hiller.
on the proximity and distance between the instant of receiving an
impression and that of recognizing it, the moment of the desire to
grab onto something and the simultaneous realization that everything
passes and is lost, even if we try to archive it.
Hiller found the souvenir that she placed beneath the quota-
tion — an artificial branch tagged “Made in Germany, USSR occu-
pied” — in a “New York junk stall” (After n.p.). Finding it and reading
the label provoked “a shock” of recognition or memory “as it flashes
by,” to cite Benjamin, because the “corsage” serves as a reminder
of two complementary historical occupations: the one that forced
Freud and Benjamin (as well as several surrealists, including Breton)
to flee German-occupied territory during World War II and the
one that forced citizens of Soviet-occupied Germany to flee during
the cold war, the war that marked her own generation (After n.p.).
In Relequia Hiller juxtaposes these two historical occupations as
corollaries, creating an oscillating time frame between Freud’s era
and her own and positioning Freud and Benjamin clearly as active
ghosts within her, who function like voices within her body, like a
recording instrument, the Bretonian echo chamber that constitutes
her personalized psychic geography, which extends beyond Europe
to include the North America of her youth.
Just as four of the boxes are tied to the ancient world (Freud’s
modernist frame of reference), four are linked to the New World.
These objects come from the United States, Hiller’s country of ori-
gin. The first of these North American boxes, titled A’shiwi (native;
010), complements the box Ενχη (002) devoted to ancient Greek
culture; both boxes display pottery shards collected at a place of an-
cient historical significance. Like an archaeologist, Hiller has placed
southwestern shards from the United States into tiny plastic bags to
preserve them. With these fired-clay fragments she features an unat-
tributed photocopied poem from an elementary school assignment
titled “Indian Children,” which evokes the ignorant idea that the
native people who once lived in the United States have disappeared,
a convenient story for a culture that for a long time sought to deny

the cruel treatment and racism native populations experienced when
white European settlers arrived, considering themselves to be the
natives of the land they called America.
Hiller points again to American ignorance about native culture in
the box Plight (018), in which she shows a sand painting purchased
in a tourist shop in New Mexico — another inexpensive souvenir. To
be precise, it is a cheap copy of a sand painting that shows a teepee
from a completely different region (the Plains). Photocopied texts
about cowboys and Indians accompany the sand painting souvenir,
highlighting stories about the heroism of white men faced with the
native populations they sought to conquer and dominate — myths
consecrated in classic Hollywood cinema.17 In a gesture that mimics
Freud’s careful annotations on the provenance of the objects in his
collection, Hiller also includes a photocopy of the documentation
that came with the sand painting; the vague explanation stands in
sharp contrast to Freud’s conscientious precision.
Hiller’s tourist souvenir can nonetheless inspire comparable
mental voyages of the sort evoked by Benjamin when he wrote that
objects in a collection allow the collector to see “through them into
their distant past” because this souvenir can also conjure memories
of places visited or merely imagined — whether the Southwest of
reality or of manufactured myth, which, she suggests with some
irony, may coexist in the contemporary American psyche. Unlike
Freud’s modernist collection, which was grounded in authenticity,
Hiller’s collection thrives on the inauthentic, approximate copy that
perpetuates false stories about the past as a way of highlighting the
postmodern notion that nothing is what it seems; truth is too elusive
and relative to be able to stand as an absolute — an idea the surrealists
had long pursued, going back to their involvement with the dada
movement as a nonrational challenge to Enlightenment thinking.
Hiller brings her own generation’s interpretation of gender into
the installation with Cowgirl (008), which shows a photocopied
photograph of Jennie Metcalf, who was both a cowgirl and an outlaw
of the sort admired by the surrealists (who praised the anarchist

50. Susan Hiller, From the Freud
Museum (1991–97). © Susan Hiller.
Germaine Berton in the first issue of La Révolution surréaliste, in

December 1924; see fig. 50). Metcalf carries a gun and wears a cowboy
hat; beneath her portrait are arranged two matching creamers in the
shape of cows. Hiller adds just one sentence to this box in After the
Freud Museum: “I never heard a woman called a cow until I came
to England.” She might have grown up hearing of cowgirls, but the
epithet cow as an unflattering equivalent for chick was unfamiliar
to her. Hiller’s personal founding myths — such as the admiration
for cowgirls and the slang words her American vocabulary did not
include — are here revealed to be rooted in her Western education,
her Jewish identity, her American childhood, her European place
of residence, her training as an anthropologist and archaeologist,
her admiration for Freud and surrealist automatism, her predilec-
tion for collecting, and her sex. While women, as “carriers” of milk,
may have traditionally been compared to vessels (if not cows), they
have less commonly been imagined as carriers of weapons. Hiller
clearly relishes the transition made by women that her juxtaposition

suggests, from positions of subservience to positions of power and
independence represented by the creamers in the shape of cows and
the photographs of Metcalf carrying not milk but a gun.
Her taste for collecting brings her close to Freud and to Breton,
but the objects she chooses identify her with her own generation,
her own time. Like the surrealists, she is critical of consumerist
society despite her love of things, because, like the surrealists, she
delights in found objects that may be recycled and given a new life
while maintaining respect for the ghosts of former functions, former
lives. In this attitude toward commodities, she shows how deeply
she shares a Marxist influence with the surrealists. With the tangible
sentences made by the syntax of her arrangement of boxes, creating
an implicit narrative out of pictures and objects, Hiller comments
on the resemblances and differences between herself and Freud. In
this statement of surrealist ghostliness founded on a double aware-
ness of the past in the present, she shows that her own “subjective
treasures” marked by her personal identity are haunted as it may be
by Freud and his prewar generation.
Excavating subjective treasures out of the earth’s depths comes
close to the work of the archivist and to Hiller’s work in At the Freud
Museum: finding objects that reflect life in the present, anticipate
future desire, and commemorate the past. Hiller’s collection consti-
tutes an archive of her thought the way Freud’s personal collection
did — objects and fragments found both in archaeological digs and
within the narratives of his patients, through which he developed
his theories, tying psychoanalytical thought to Greek myth and al-
lowing the collected objects sitting before him on his desk to act as
reminders of the archive of psychoanalysis he was creating. In the
suspended present moment of writing — where time can seem to
stand still — he reflected on myths from the past as he developed
theories for the future about the functioning of the human psyche.
Hiller’s objects act like writing on the movable sheet of conscious-
ness, according to Freud’s Mystic Writing Pad model. Her digging
extends from antiquity to the present, with aspects at once global

and deeply personal, universal and utterly individual. Her surreal-
ist, Freudian, feminist, and postmodern sensibilities coalesce into
her contemporary interpretation of the surrealist object. She shows
how the desire to collect intersects with the desire to discover lost
aspects of the self, to bring them into the light of day and to rely on
them as talismanic reminders of the ever-shifting present moment
of insight while moving inexorably toward a future that portends
mortality. This desire transforms buried subjective treasures into
newly discovered inner ghosts, made as visible as in a spiritualist
photograph.
With Freud in mind, and guided by Hiller’s visual syntax, we
move along the rows of boxes in the vitrines, peering into them
as if we could see beyond the movable sheet of the Mystic Writing
Pad into the traces imprinted on the wax slab of Hiller’s psyche. It
is as if she had put in front of us a personalized version of the sur-
realist “unsilvered glass” from Breton and Soupault’s first automatic
text, The Magnetic Fields, and given us permission to see through
it. Hiller shows us to what extent our own objects, hidden in our
drawers at home and spread out on the shelves of our studies, look
like her collection and even, perhaps, like the objects collected by
Freud and Breton. We surround ourselves with material and psychic
ghosts from the past. These objects hold within them aspects of our-
selves and help us to understand ourselves; they help to situate us in
time — eternally suspended between the past and the future — and
to identify our own personal versions of archive fever. They also
confirm the persistence of surrealist ghostliness, not only in Hiller’s
work but in the receptive response to it. Ghostliness has become
normalized the way Freudian psychological principles have been;
it pervades our cultural understanding of ourselves.
Like silvered glass mirrors, our objects reflect back to us our own
desires, and we can feel their ghosts in our own unconscious minds
as we look at Hiller’s private collection on display. Each object we
collect crystallizes our own story and, in the long run, has a lot in
common with the range of objects collected by Hiller: many of us

have areas of our psychic geographies that intersect with hers, such
as a shared history of reading Greek myths, admiration for cowgirls,
or a predilection for combing flea markets for odd things that call
to us. In Freud’s house, Hiller shows us how, like her, we organize
our things and ourselves in accord with Freud’s principles, the way
Breton and the surrealists did. She confirms that, thanks to him, if
we take into account what we surround ourselves with and how we
live, if we embrace the double awareness of the coexisting realities in
our worlds, material and psychic, crystallized in our objects, which
through our handling of them we have invested with a personalized
auratic power, we have the possibility of leveraging surrealist ghostli-
ness, as much a legacy of the twentieth century as Freud’s thought,
and discovering greater clarity about our personal psychic lives and,
as a result, about ourselves.
Hiller shows us that we all live in Freud’s house. She also shows
us that we share with her and the surrealists a desire to personalize
Freud’s method of unearthing and materializing ghosts in people and
things and, through others, in ourselves. To discover such subjec-
tive treasures was indeed automatism’s goal and its legacy. Through
persistent reference to ghosts and ghostliness, artists like Hiller,
following in the footsteps of the surrealists, acknowledge that Freud-
ian psychology, as the twentieth-century science that explains the
phenomena that the spiritualists sought to harness through occult
practices, reveals how complicated we are, filled with as many ir-
rational drives as rational thoughts. Freud encouraged us to master
these drives; the surrealists encouraged us to welcome them as so
many ghostly forces that could stimulate creativity and insight.

Conclusion
Returning from World War I, the first generation of surrealists, which

included André Breton, Paul Eluard, and Max Ernst, shared a height-
ened awareness of mortality connected to the intense experience
of this particular war, in which death was everywhere visible and
perpetually imminent. Their curiosity about the Freudian uncon-
scious fed a desire to build something new that was haunted by the
memory of loss. This desire is crystallized in “The Pretty Redhead”
(1918), one of the last poems by their mentor and World War I soldier
Guillaume Apollinaire, in which he communicates a poet soldier’s
perspective on the experience of war:
We want to give you vast and strange domains
Where mystery in flower spreads out for those who would pluck it
There you may find new fires colors you have never seen before
A thousand imponderable phantasms
Still awaiting reality. (345)
With this poem Apollinaire anticipates the surrealists’ quest to ex-
plore the “vast and strange” domains accessible to them through
the truths they hoped their unconscious minds might unlock in the
balance between memory, desire, and mortality.
Surrealist ghostliness, which emerged in their creative practice,
constitutes a heightened sense of mortality together with a transposi-
tion of spiritualism, which was also at the origin of Freud’s own early
experiments with hypnosis and was popular during their childhoods
(see Borch-Jacobsen). The young surrealists wanted more than dada
had offered, more than playful subversions of authority, so they
idealistically began to experiment with a new form of automatism.
227
The punning structure of surrealist ghostliness models awareness of
coexisting realities, conscious and unconscious, manifest and latent,
vital and mortal. As Derrida explains in his meditation on Freud, it
is also the structure of the archival (or collecting) impulse whereby
the coexisting yet contradictory drives toward death and pleasure
coalesce in an intensified present moment in the hopeless desire
to stop time and archive what we have learned so far. The archival
impulse also characterizes a lot of surrealist production through its
ghostly structures with their barely repressed awareness of death.
In a wider sense, surrealist ghostliness is at work every time what-
ever is latent or repressed rises to a level of visibility equal to that of
its countervailing force, so that the two forces may be seen together
and at the same time in an intensely experienced present moment,
as in Holbein’s anamorphic painting The Ambassadors. This baring
of the evidence of coexisting realities, this baring of the archival
impulse, which is also concentrated in an intensely present experi-
ence, has the subversive effect of disrupting chronological time. Like
the dreamtime into which a surrealist automatist falls, wherein past,
present, and future may coexist, this disruption of chronological
time constitutes another aspect of the punning doubleness typical
of surrealist ghostliness that thwarts expectations, conventions, and
assumptions with humor. Retrospective and anticipatory at the same
time, this concentration on the present links disparate historical
epochs and worldviews in a way that makes visible how the human
condition resounds with echoing ghosts — of past history, knowledge,
and experience — even as it anticipates in shadowy form what may
be to come.
Finally, this focus on experience necessary to surrealist ghostliness,
on a suspended moment linked to surrealist receptivity in stillness,
then to the rushing flow of words and images that results from that
receptivity in automatic practice, is connected to talismanic objects.
It is through the things that personify and embody our human link
to the material world and the daily here and now that we connect to
our memories and dreams. Our objects transport us into the past or
228 Conclusion
dreams of the future while, through the connection of touch, keeping
us well rooted in the present moment. At the same time, our objects,
particularly those that have been so handled by us, so invested by us
with our own memories that they become extensions of ourselves,
hold within them a personalized version of Benjaminian aura. The
surrealists’ fascination with objects led them to a global appreciation
of things Western and non-Western and precipitated their shift in
scientific emphasis from psychoanalysis to ethnography. For them,
archival items also unconsciously remind us humans of the objects
we will become when we die. Our most treasured objects are our
most uncanny possessions.
The surrealists’ embrace of psychology extended to objects they
found ghostly in their ability to communicate back to humans those
thoughts and feelings projected onto them by desire. Surrealist ghost-
liness clings to objects cherished, held, and collected, with no concern
for monetary value, things that help their possessors believe they
may attain greater understanding of themselves. Having developed
out of the gothic imagination and spiritualism of the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries, surrealist ghostliness found its way throughout
the twentieth century into vastly disparate works of art, all of which
reflect the fundamental insight that surrealism drew from Freud and
from automatism: that receptivity to the intensity of the experience of
the present moment allows a human being to join the past with the
future, to feel simultaneously physically and psychically contained
and free, and to entertain and survive the knowledge of her or his
past together with the foreknowledge of death, partly through the
playful physical entertainment of the idea of the corporeal pun — of
the interchangeability between humans and things.
In its persistent reflexivity, its inherent doubleness, its forceful
insistence on the most fundamental human truth — that human
beings are defined by their mortality — surrealist ghostliness illumi-
nates the ways in which surrealist theories always embodied aspects
of both modernist and postmodernist tendencies. Contemporary
visual art shows the extent to which surrealism, with its emphasis
Conclusion 229
on the ordinary, on chance, and on the threat of futility, subtends
the postmodern aesthetic as a disavowed ghost. At once idealistic
and self-deprecating, surrealist consciousness was nothing if not
self-aware. Yet it was also determined to dream, in the two senses
of the word: to allow unconsciousness to inform consciousness and
to have faith in impossible imaginings.
The doubleness I call surrealist ghostliness is a physical sensa-
tion that constitutes the twentieth century’s answer to the gothic
imagination that the Enlightenment triggered two hundred years
earlier, a culminating modernism that tips over into a profoundly
postmodern sensibility through its enhanced self-awareness. The
poetic and visual wakefulness it conveys communicates what it feels
like to experience what Foucault called “the raw and naked” act of
automatism, of pure creation linked to the deepest possible trance.
It constitutes an artistic avant-garde answer to the consecration of
the Freudian uncanny in late twentieth-century theory, as Anneleen
Masschelein argues (Unconcept 112–13).
In this book I have traced examples of surrealist ghostliness in film,
photography, painting, and collaged and collected objects, created by
women and men from Europe and North America, from the 1920s
through the 1990s, from the Parisian first- and second-generation
surrealists to those working on the movement’s periphery. In ev-
ery example the paradigm of coexisting realities emerges through
puns and anamorphosis, enhanced by a heightened awareness of the
sense of touch. Sensuality adheres to these examples in the appeal to
peripheral vision and intuition, as do disruptions in chronological
time. In their openness to ghostly experience beyond spiritualism,
the surrealists not only inaugurated the psychological century; they
epitomized it in their study of how human experience extends beyond
the knowledge we accumulate with our rational abilities to include
the knowledge we acquire in our dreams and through our awareness
of the material world that surrounds us, making of each individual
an ethnographer of his or her home environment, even as “home”
becomes increasingly global through virtual, even ghostly, access.
230 Conclusion
Surrealist ghostliness naturalized psychological understanding as
part of human knowledge, using vivid imagery that captured the
latent haunting that subtends manifest Western culture, exemplifying
surrealism’s force as the most influential avant-garde movement of
the twentieth century.
Conclusion 231
Notes
Introduction
1. Apollinaire coined the word sur-réalisme in the program notes he wrote
for the avant-garde ballet Parade in 1917.
2. See Daniel Cottom’s study for a philosophical analysis of the inter-
relationship between spiritualism and surrealism.
3. Freud also experimented with hypnosis; see Borch-Jacobsen.
4. For the role of women in this historical trajectory, see Castle.
5. In the 1966 edition of Surrealism and Painting Breton pays tribute to
several mediumistic artists now considered classic outsiders, including Joseph
Crépin, Augustin Lesage, Hector Hyppolite, and Aloyse.
6. Aragon’s “A Wave of Dreams” (1924) constitutes a surrealist “manifesto”
from his perspective, whereas his “Challenge to Painting” (1930) redefines
key concepts such as “the marvelous.” Desnos similarly takes a turn defining
surrealism on his own terms in the “Third Manifesto of Surrealism” (1930;
Essential 68–73), as does Max Ernst in “Beyond Painting” (1936), which blends
autobiography with a history of surrealism and his own definitions of “the
marvelous” and other ideas. For more on different voices participating in
the collective definition of the movement, see my Robert Desnos 5.
7. In the “Manifesto,” Breton calls for a rejection of the impulse to catego-
rize and classify: “Our brains are dulled by the incurable mania of wanting
to make the unknown known, classifiable” (Manifestoes 9).
8. See Aragon’s “Challenge to Painting” (1930) and Ernst’s “Beyond Paint-
ing” (1936).
9. In Please Touch, Mileaf develops an extended history and analysis of
objects in dada and surrealism.
10. My thanks to Marian Eide for discussing Benjamin’s aura in this way
with me. Also see my “Surrealism and Outsider Art.”
11. Breton famously preferred Oceanic objects to African ones. Sophie
Leclercq sees in this preference a lack of interest in patina as a sign of authen-
ticity (108). Nonetheless his inclusion of Tzara’s essay on touch in Minotaure
surely suggests his endorsement of this important sense.
233
12. Time and temple look and sound similar, confirming the twentieth-
century worship of clocked time; agile and eagle also sound and look similar,
confirming the nobility of both time and temple together with the surrealist
stamp of agility, the factor that disturbs industrial time’s rationality.
13. All poetry is arguably anamorphic, according to Michael Riffaterre,
because a poem can be understood only retrospectively (104).
14. Hung on a wall next to a doorway, the painting may be seen first
head-on and then again with a lateral, backward glance upon leaving the
room (Baltrusaitis 104–05).
15. I thank Benjamin Andréo for reminding me of Breton’s references to
Holbein’s Ambassadors in L’Art Magique.
16. Although a translation exists in the English edition of Surrealism and
Painting, I refer here to the French version of the essay as it was published
originally in Cahiers d’art because it is more complete. The translation is
my own.
17. Breton writes about “the light of the image”: “The value of the image
depends upon the beauty of the spark obtained; it is, consequently, a function
of the difference of potential between the two conductors” (Manifestoes 37).
18. The full quotation reads, “Poets and artists meet scholars at the heart
of these ‘force fields’ created in the imagination by the juxtaposing differ-
ent images. This faculty of juxtaposition of two images allows them to see
above the manifest life of the object, which generally functions as a kind of
wall” (“Crise” 22).
19. In French he writes more elliptically, “Cette étrange exposition . . .
qui ne durera malheureusement que huit jours, nous montre non le dernier
mais le premier stade de l’énergie poétique que l’on trouve un peu partout
à l’état latent mais qu’il s’agissait une fois de plus de révéler” (Oeuvres com-
plètes 2:1199–200).
20. Sheringham cites from the lecture Breton gave in Belgium to the Belgian
surrealist group in 1934, “What Is Surrealism?”: “Hence, far from seeking to
transcend the real, Surrealism comprises ‘une volonté d’approfondissement
du réel, de prise de conscience toujours plus nette en même temps que
toujours plus passionnée du monde sensible’ (a desire to deepen the real,
and to apprehend ever more clearly and more passionately the world of the
senses) (II, 231)” (71). A complete translation may be found in Rosemont,
What Is Surrealism?
21. See Clark. My thanks to Eric Santner for his talk “The People’s Two
Bodies: Reflections on the Somatic Sublime” at Dartmouth and for our con-
234 Notes to pages 13–19

versation in the context of the Humanities Institute on States of Exception:
Sovereignty, Security, Secrecy, during the spring of 2009.
1. Man Ray’s Ghostly Objects

1. All excerpts from this essay are my own translations.
2. Jed Perl explains, “Like Lázló Moholy-Nagy, who started making similar
experiments, which he called photograms, in Berlin around the same time,
Man Ray may have been aware of the cameraless Schadographs made by
Christian Shad in Zurich around 1918” (7).
3. See Kuenzli 4; Fotiade, “Untamed” 400.
4. Dawn Ades explains that the surrealists avoided thinking of objects
explicitly as fetishes, in deference to Marcel Mauss’s characterization of the
word fetish “as a dangerous caricature” (“Surrealism” 70).
5. All translations from this essay are my own.
6. Ernst concludes “Beyond Painting” (originally published in the same
number of Cahiers d’art that served as the catalogue for the exhibition of
surrealist objects that included Breton’s “Crisis of the Object”) with a refor-
mulation of the conclusion of Breton’s Nadja (“Beauty will be convulsive or
will not be at all”): “identity will be convulsive or will not be” (134).
7. Norman Gambill identifies six “clear” sections or sequences in the
film (30).
8. There are eight images of women in Emak Bakia that may well have
been played by only four or six women: an eye opening superimposed on a
headlight, which, by juxtaposition with the image of a woman driver, seems
to be a woman’s eye; the woman driver; a woman in the beachfront villa
combing her hair; a woman lying on the beach, whose face is covered; a
woman who opens her eyes (who could be the same as the one whose single
eye has already been glimpsed); a woman wearing a headband opening her
eyes and smiling; yet another woman opening her eyes and smiling through
tears, who could be the woman at the villa; and Kiki with her eyelids made
up to look like a doll, opening her eyes and smiling at the very end of the
film. See Adamowicz, “Bodies”; and Phillips for more on the images of
women in the film.
9. There is also a split-second still of an ocean wave that looks like a woman’s
nude torso, the outline of her breasts framed by a fish tail and seaweed.
10. Ray later became a serious appreciator of African art. See Wendy
Grossman’s careful analysis.
Notes to pages 22–34 235

11. The Wheelers financed the film (see Turner). My thanks to Annabel
Martin for confirming the translation of emak bakia, which means “leave
me alone” in Basque.
12. These wooden blocks are used as a still-image illustration for an install-
ment of Breton’s “Le Surréalisme et la peinture” in La Révolution surréaliste
(October 1927). After the film was finished Ray transformed this object by
adding hair from a bow he purchased at a Paris flea market (Schwarz 155).
Later Ray would transfer his fascination with necks to the human neck of
Lee Miller, which he photographed and painted in at least two poses.
13. A still of Homme d’affaires illustrated the March issue of La Révolution
surréaliste in 1928.
14. Johanna Malt suggests that objects such as gloves, shoes, and collars
that have hollow forms and still bear the “the traces of the body which once
occupied” them have a ghostly quality. They became “ghostly tokens of a
lost human presence” (216).
15. In 1933 the surrealists even conducted a research session in the last
number of Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution “on the irrational knowl-
edge of the object” in which both Breton and Giacometti participated.
16. In Mad Love from 1937 (first published as an article in Minotaure in
1934), Breton names coral, particularly in Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, as
exemplary of the marvelous and of surrealist convulsive beauty (13).
17. This focus on visuality again evokes Didi-Huberman’s idea of the
traîne visuelle, an awareness of how the virtual world on the screen moves
forward. See my “Woman in the Bottle.”
18. Breton’s comment places such objects — found and interpreted found
objects — in opposition to the more elaborately fabricated objects published
in the same issue of Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution according to the
guidelines laid out by Dalí in his essay “Surrealist Objects” (Collected 231–34).
19. This essay was first published in French in Minotaure 3–4 (1933): 1.
20. See Durozoi 344; Kachur.
21. This first surrealist object, like Breton’s “internal model,” begins in
the imagination, having been generated by the psychic interconnections
within the group that created the exquisite corpse drawing and believed in
collective synergies (Surrealism and Painting 4).
22. The chapter was first published in June 1934 as “Equation de l’objet
trouvé” in a special issue of the Belgian journal Documents 34.

2. Claude Cahun’s Exploration
1. Cahun thus explores aesthetically some of the same questions about
what makes humans human addressed by Derrida in his 1997 talk at Cerisy-
la-Salle, later published in English as The Animal That Therefore I Am (2008).
2. In Bachelors Krauss calls this phenomenon “a kind of directional re-
versibility” (47). For the use of this photograph as a mock perfume label by
Duchamp, see Stamelman, Perfume.
3. Moore was the daughter of Cahun’s father’s second wife. Also a visual
artist, she and Cahun became inseparable companions as children, and
remained so throughout their lives. Val Nelson at the Jersey Heritage Trust
argues persuasively that the photographs Moore took on her own lacked the
energy of the shots she helped Cahun to shoot, as photographs by Moore
taken after Cahun’s death suggest.
4. As the first of a handful of images grouped at the end of the issue it is
particularly striking because this new journal usually had few illustrations.
The second issue, for example, in addition to Ray’s photograph, included
reproductions of paintings by Tanguy and Dalí, two photographs of children
at an International Socialist meeting, the photograph of a worker’s letter,
and two unattributed satirical photographs.
5. My thanks to Tony Penrose for pointing out how clear it is that Miller
and Ray knew Cahun’s work through their mutual friend Desnos, who posed
for Cahun in 1930 (see the cover of my book Robert Desnos). Desnos and
Ray collaborated on the film L’Etoile de mer (1928).
6. While these could be called misogynist because of the potentially
violent representation of a headless torso, the robbing of individual iden-
tity from the model, in “Ladies Shot and Painted,” her iconically feminist
essay about representations of women, Mary Ann Caws finds that Ray’s
photograph of Kiki’s torso from Retour à la raison adds “to the beauty of
the female form” (274).
7. Only one, held at the Jersey Heritage Archive, plays with the illusion
that the head is dead.
8. Cottingham suggests this mix of confinement and escape in regard to
this particular photograph (33).
9. I borrow here from Stamelman’s definitions of Barthes’s terms as “the
punctum (piercing detail) and the studium (commonplace element) of a
photograph” (Lost 256).
10. Her use of parody in her depictions of her heroines recalls Susan
Suleiman’s description of the strategy of surrealist women as mimicry as a

commentary on portraits of women by surrealist men (Subversive). See also
my “Claude Cahun’s Counter-Archival Heroïnes” and Automatic Woman.
11. Carolyn Dean insists that “these figures . . . perform roles whose mean-
ing they do not understand” in a psychoanalytic reading that suggests that
they “eternally reproduce figures (the homosexual, the sinful woman) that
justify witch hunts” (85). I would add that they do not understand the roles
that history and legend have ascribed to them.
12. The transition of the Surrealism: Desire Unbound show from the Tate
Modern in the fall of 2001 to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the winter
of 2002 shows how the status of women in surrealism remains contested.
Works by women after World War II, such as two of Dorothea Tanning’s
sculptures, were removed from the exhibition when it crossed the Atlantic
and shifted from the curatorial direction of a woman, Jennifer Mundy, to
that of a man, William Lieberman.
13. Although her story is generally believed to be a fiction, The Encyclo-
pedia of the Jewish Religion claims “that a historical basis for the incident
may be found dating from the late Persian Period in Palestine” (Werblowsky
and Wigoder 219).
14. For Bal this is because the violence of her act seems anything but
objective. Also, because the act takes place off camera, so to speak, it con-
stitutes an “invisible adventure” (to quote Cahun) about which assumptions
were made afterward.
15. Another one of her “Heroines” stories is devoted to a Salomé who has
trouble distinguishing between art and life and prefers the papier-mâché
version of a severed head to John the Baptist’s actual head, which she has
asked for on a whim. “It is not good theater,” she complains while claiming
the right to be different from others (78).
16. In “Surrealist Precipitates” Hollier argues that it is a shadow that pre-
cipitates Leiris’s autobiography: “What Leiris called the literary equivalent
of the shadow of the bull’s horn should propel the autobiographical text in
the shared space of history” (124).
17. This self-portrait may have originated as a straight shot taken in 1921
(see plate 2 in Inverted Odysseys), then bent to create the stretched look of
the head.
18. In reference to a different self-portrait by Cahun, identified as “a
figure of ghostliness,” Sharla Hutchison notes that its “distorted form also
calls attention to the fragile nature of . . . the body’s inability to create and
sustain meaning — in particular, gendered meanings” (222).

19. My thanks to Laurie Monahan for our e-mail conversation of March
17, 2003.
20. My thanks to David Getsy for help with this insight.
21. It seems to contradict Barthes’s assertion that photographs are flat
(Camera 106). His discussion of this quality, of course, is framed in refer-
ence to straight photography.
22. Carol Armstrong has argued about André Kertesz’s Distortions (1933)
that photographic distortions of the body invite heightened empathy and self-
reflexivity (67). Steven Harris insists that for Cahun, “the sense of touch was
very important to the erotic dimension of the objects” she made (“Coup” 97).
23. David Bate elaborates: “But if Claude Cahun’s image evokes death it
is (as in Holbein’s painting) as a metaphor for what cannot be represented”
(10). Therese Lichtenstein describes one of Cahun’s photomontages as “ana-
morphic” (67).
24. My thanks to Barbara Kreiger and Keith Walker for discussing their
impressions of this image with me.
25. During World War II she was arrested and condemned to death for
acts of resistance. Her death sentence was commuted and her Jewishness
was never discovered, so although she remained jailed for the duration of
the war she avoided deportation.
26. For more on Cahun’s strategy of masking as a way of establishing a
complex public persona, see Adamowicz, “Claude Cahun.”
27. For an insightful study of Cahun’s photomontages, see Lasalle and
Solomon-Godeau.
28. Joan Rivière, writing at almost the same time, makes the follow-
ing well-known argument: “Womanliness therefore could be assumed and
worn as a mask, both to hide the possession of masculinity and to avert the
reprisals expected if she was found to possess it” (38). Laurie J. Monahan
analyzes Cahun’s work in light of Rivière’s essay, as do Whitney Chadwick
(“Infinite”) and Abigail Solomon-Godeau (“Equivocal”). Monahan specifies,
“It was precisely through this indistinct subject position that the coherence
of the self was most vulnerable, and therein lay the revolutionary potential
of subjectivity itself ” (130). Nanda van den Berg expands her reading of
Cahun’s use of the masquerade to include an analysis of the “masquerades”
of male surrealists.
29. Although not in terms of cross-dressing specifically, similar readings of
Cahun’s work as a “challenge to determinate meaning” and “as a challenge to
stable, singular subjectivity” (Dean 87) have been presented by Dean, Lasalle

and Solomon-Godeau, and Lichtenstein, although in more psychoanalytical
terms in the latter two cases — linking her work to the “unspeakable” (Lassalle
and Solomon-Godeau 13) and to “that moment existing paradoxically before
the symbolic, before the rationalization of language and image” (Lichtenstein
67). Monahan also analyzes Cahun’s “desire to ‘dematerialize’ the limits of
the self ” (131). Katy Kline characterizes Human Frontier as a “striking ana-
morphic self-study” and analyzes “the absence of fixity” in her writings (73)
and sees her overall achievement as stretching, permeating, and infiltrating
“the established boundaries of gender definitions” (76).
30. Katy Deepwell similarly affirms that Cahun’s confounding of categories
should be understood in the larger context of the “surrealist, anti-fascist and
anti-bourgeois politics she embraced” (18).
31. In Bachelors Krauss similarly links Cahun to a surrealist fascination
with “declassing” (5). She also argues against a specifically gendered Imaginary
and for “a fluidity in the field of the Imaginary that allows for its position to
be occupied by more than one gender at once,” which the parallel between
Cahun and Duchamp shows (50).
32. Krauss postulates that such a spectator would “find unbearable a
photography that effaces categories and in their place erects the fetish, the
informe, the uncanny” (“Corpus” 95). Yet this theory, based on a particu-
lar kind of spectator and a universal notion of straight photography, has
recently been challenged by Batchen, Roberts, and Walker. Walker writes
in opposition to Krauss of “the Surrealist use of straight photography as
a simultaneous exploitation and subversion of the standard realist frame
within which the medium was then primarily situated” (5). For him the
photograph is inherently double, as it is for Batchen, who sees in photography
“the representation of a reality that is itself nothing but a play of representa-
tions” (Burning 198). Walker effectively repositions straight photography
within surrealist studies, even though he echoes Krauss’s comparison of
surrealist photography to the “automatic writing of the world” (Krauss,
“Photography” 35; Walker 23).
33. Georgiana Colvile, following Leperlier, has identified Cahun’s dis-
comfort with her own body as anorexia and analyzed her work accordingly
(“Self ”). See also Brauer.
34. I disagree with Harris’s excellent study of Cahun’s work wherein he
sees, after Bate, this head as a “phallic distortion” that “proposes an image
of female desire that is also phallic” (“Coup” 99; see Bate 10).

35. Barthes also appears to argue for photography as a kind of writing.
Stamelman understands Barthes to claim that we “read” a photograph, even
if “we do not see” it (Lost 266).
3. Brassaï and Dalí’s Involuntary Sculptures

1. Dalí’s handwriting is evident in notes on a proof of Involuntary Sculptures.
2. See Harris’s study of the surrealist object in Surrealist Art and Thought
in the 1930s.
3. Ades has argued that Minotaure’s photographic “documents, records,”
show how photographs can “reveal contrasting realities in objects,” thus test-
ing “the validity of knowledge gained by classification” since the contrasting
realities make them classifiable in at least two ways (“Photography” 187).
4. In Mad Love Breton catalogues the things and experiences that make
him shiver and convulse, including Paris, which he describes as “a forest of
symbols.” An object he might accidentally find or encounter could reveal
“the marvelous precipitate of desire” (13–15).
5. See Stamelman (“Photography”) for more on Brassaï’s photographic
study of Paris.
6. The fame of this statement stems from its source as a critique of the
Primitivism exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1984 (see Flam
and Deutsch). See Price for recent thinking about non-Western masks and
sculptures as having been created by artists whose superior skill was prized
even if the Western concept of the museum was unfamiliar to them.
7. See Finkelstein’s translation of Dalí’s Collected Writings.
8. “By a double image is meant such a representation of an object that it
is also, without the slightest physical or anatomical change, the representa-
tion of another entirely different object, the second representation being
equally devoid of any deformation or abnormality betraying arrangement”
(Dalí, “Stinking” 98). Apparition of Face and Fruit Dish on a Beach (1938)
is an example: what looks at first glance like a dreamy rendition of the title
consists at the same time, and on a second glance, of a surprisingly realistic
portrait of a large dog.
9. The phrase ethnographic thinking is inspired by Michèle Richman’s
expression “anthropological thinking” (“Anthropology” 184).
10. See Fabian, who argues that this distorted sense of time arises from
colonialism: “One assigns to the conquered populations a different Time” (30).
11. As discussed in the introduction, Breton contradicts the illustrations
in the text by echoing the claim he made eleven years earlier for the differ-

ence between spiritualism and surrealism in “The Mediums Enter” (1922).
See also chapter 7 and my “Surrealism and Outsider Art.”
12. My thanks to Meryl Altman for her insight into the progression of the
notion of authenticity in the twentieth century. See Taoua’s astute analysis of
the contradictions between the surrealists’ anticolonialist (anti-imperialist)
ideals and their embrace of primitivism, as well as Antle.
13. For more on the baroque, see Maffesoli; Deleuze; Lacan, “On the
Baroque”; Buci-Glucksmann; and Sypher.
14. I thank Susan Doheny for reminding me of Blossfeldt’s images, par-
ticularly as they appear with Bataille’s “The Language of Flowers.”
15. Although I rely on Finkelstein’s translation of this essay, I have also
modified it fairly frequently in the interest of staying as close as possible to
the French original, beginning with Dalí’s use of “Modern Style” in the title
instead of “Art Nouveau.” The three captions that refer to the Modern Style
read as follows: Caption 1: “Rolled bus ticket, found in the vest pocket of an
ordinary bureaucrat (from the Crédit Lyonnais bank); the most frequent
characteristic of the Modern Style.” Caption 3: “Ornamental and Modern Style
bread escapes from limp stereotyping.” Caption 4: “Piece of soap presenting
the automatic forms of Modern Style found in a bathroom.”
16. Roger Rothman’s paper at the Modernist Studies Association confer-
ence in Montreal in November 2009 explored at length Dalí’s understanding
of “the structure and function of anachronism.” I thank him for permission
to quote him; please also see Rothman 181. Dalí’s word choice might also
have been part of what David Lomas has called his “programmatic anti-
modernism” of the sort championed by Clement Greenberg, for whom Dalí’s
work was abject, what modernism must “cast aside or abject in order to be
itself. But this is exactly as Dalí intended” (147).
17. Briony Fer also identifies hysteria as the surrealists understood it, as
“an unconscious protest . . . against patriarchal law” (212).
18. Dalí’s approach is also in harmony with Breton’s and Aragon’s under-
standing of the term, in their celebration titled “The Fiftieth Anniversary
of Hysteria” in 1928 in La Révolution surréaliste. They identified hysteria
as “a supreme means of expression” freed from reason and as a material
language of the body. They suggest that hysteria stirs the human soul and
subverts the subject’s relationship with the “moral world” partly through its
“need of a reciprocal seduction” (320–21). The language of the body is typi-
cally illustrated by Aragon and Breton with the body of a woman, Charcot’s
famous patient known as Augustine, whose poses were considered seduc-

tive. For the body of a woman, Dalí substitutes the material corporeality of
sculptures and buildings whose effect on the viewer, according to him, is
very much the same.
19. In “Surrealism, the Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia,”
Benjamin writes that Breton “was the first to perceive the revolutionary
energies that appear in the ‘outmoded’” (in Walker 95).
20. With his introduction of edibility, Dalí outdoes Bataille in exploring
critically Durkheim’s sociological distance, and he does so through an exag-
gerated form of surrealist ghostliness. The analytical gaze Bataille turns on his
own culture becomes distorted by Dalí’s introduction of his personal desire
for the object of analysis because surrealist ghostliness, through its uncanny
relation to the creator’s own mortality, is the record of an intensely personal
experience, as Foucault later understood. In Bataille’s model, the ambivalent
pulls of the “left” sacred of the burial ground (for putrefying flesh) and the
“right” sacred of the adjacent church at the center of the French village unite
the villagers with each other around the central square and prompt them to
maintain a respectful distance from the sacred objects themselves. The more
ambiguous attraction of the desired object for Dalí, both as an idea and as a
real hunger for both the sweet and the repellent, calls for direct interaction
with it in a manner that collapses distance.
21. This urge to consume what he desired extended to his love for a human
being. He reveals in The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí that his dearest wish had
been to kill his object of desire. Then he met Gala Eluard, who divined his
secret and tricked him into giving it up by anticipating it, asking him to kill
her. “What is wrong with you, Dalí?” he writes to himself. “Can’t you see
that now, when your crime is being offered to you as a present, you don’t
want it any longer! . . . Gala thus weaned me from my crime and cured my
madness” (248).
22. He performs what Frank Kermode describes as “a change of aspect,”
for Kermode perhaps the most significant work accomplished by modernism:
to make a reader/viewer suddenly see something familiar in a new way. By
accomplishing this “change of aspect” in Minotaure, Dalí was at once at his
most surrealist and his most ethnographic.
23. This is also true of his photocollage titled The Phenomenon of Ecstasy,
which includes body parts and women’s faces, one of which is a Modern
Style sculpted face seen from a new angle.
24. The French ethnographic photographer, on the other hand, suppos-
edly maintains a position of observational distance on the ritual throughout.

25. Gikandi effectively exposes the unreliability of the Western ethnogra-
pher’s informants based on their close relations with “leading ethnographers
of primitive cultures” and their consequent participation “in a cohesive field
of discourse,” which “reinforced the idea of a core set of beliefs that were
uniform across Africa” (476).
26. In his own way Dalí anticipates critiques of ethnographic objectivity
like Gikandi’s “Picasso, Africa, and the Schemata of Difference.”
27. Dalí seems to anticipate here the personal exploration of the sacred
in everyday life undertaken in the context of the College of Sociology by
Leiris, who had participated in the Dakar-Djibouti mission.
4. Lee Miller’s Egyptian Landscapes

1. See chapter 2, note 5. For a careful comparative study of Ray’s and
Miller’s styles during their collaboration, including their fashion photog-
raphy, see Hubert.
2. Solarization was a process previously known as the Sabattier effect
(named after Armand Sabattier, “who first described it” [Rosenblum 641,
note 6]), which was “rediscovered.” Livingston claims that “Alfred Stieglitz
had actually done it first” (35).
3. In terms of Caws’s key question about women looking at representa-
tions of women in surrealism — “Does the woman looking take the stance
of another or of a same?” — Miller seems to see a “same” when shooting
Ramm’s head, whereas Ray appears to see much more of an “other” (“Ladies”
269).
4. Mileaf (Please 79) notes Leiris’s insistence that binding a face provokes
jouissance in his essay on W. B. Seabrook’s photographs of women’s heads
bound in leather masks from Documents.
5. In 1933 Miller made a portrait of another head that appears incongru-
ously alive, titled Floating Head, Portrait of Mary Taylor. This head is not in
a bell jar, but Miller shot it so that it looks detached from its body.
6. The show was curated by Roland Penrose.
7. My thanks to Monique Seguy for her unpublished study of this pho-
tograph.
8. See Breton: “I believe in the pure Surrealist joy of the man who . . . sets
off from whatever point he chooses, along any other path save a reasonable
one, and arrives wherever he can” (Manifestoes 46).
9. My thanks to Kate Goldsborough for her unpublished study of this
photograph. This image parallels Ray’s similar visual puns inspired by the

body, particularly his photograph of a neck bent backward (probably Miller’s),
titled Anatomies (1930).
10. Henry Fox Talbot, one of the originators of photography, wrote in 1839
about the image of his own house: “This building I believe to be the first that
was ever known to have drawn its own picture” (in Batchen, Burning 66).
11. Burke sees this photograph as playing “with traditional associations
of woman and nature.” The sacks, “as stand-ins, or cover-ups, for female
anatomy,” are linked to the transcendence and freedom of their “ethereal
counterparts in the sky” (“Framing” 130). During World War II, when she
photographed the London Blitz for Vogue magazine, Miller continued to
wryly anthropomorphize objects such as the blasted typewriter in Remington
Silent (see Antle 60–61).
12. Once again, in terms of the question posed by Caws about the way
women look at women in surrealism — “Does the woman looking take the
stance of another or of a same?” — Miller may see an “other” before she sees
a “same” in this landscape traditionally feminized by Western patriarchal
culture, in order to redefine it as a woman like herself, self-conscious of her
erotic power yet retaining a sense of humor about it (“Ladies” 269).
13. See Gasarian; Colvile, “Breton.”
14. Shots taken before and after Miller’s final version of Portrait of Space
reveal that this image features a window, not a tent. The illusion of being
in the desert, far away from houses with screened windows, is nonetheless
powerful, as I argue here. See Haworth-Booth 134–37. See Patricia Allmer’s
essay on this photograph in the forthcoming special issue of Dada/Surreal-
ism devoted to Egypt.
15. Other cloud-bird paintings by Magritte include Le Repos de l’esprit,
a lost gouache from 1942; a gouache of Le Retour that resembles in theme
but not in shape its oil analogue (1955); a gorgeous lost gouache of Le Baiser
from 1957; L’Entrée en scène, a gouache from 1961; La Grande famille, a well-
known oil from 1963; and L’Oiseau du ciel, which he created for the Sabena
airline company (1966).
16. This emptiness is reminiscent of the work of Eugène Atget, who was
so admired by the surrealists that they published his photographs in La
Révolution surréaliste.
5. Dorothea Tanning’s Gothic Ghostliness

1. In the original “Manifeste du surréalisme,” Breton makes specific men-
tion of the fairy tale “Peau d’âne,” “Donkey Skin” (Oeuvres complètes 1:320).

In “(Re)reading (Post-)Surrealism through Dorothea Tanning’s Chasm,”
Catriona McAra argues that Destina is driven by curiosity to gain knowledge
of her own narrative story (435).
2. The Tate Modern owns the painting and dates it from 1943, as does
the Dorothea Tanning Foundation. Jean-Christophe Bailly’s comprehensive
book Dorothea Tanning ascribes the date 1946 to it.
3. My thanks to Stephanie Nguyen for her unpublished study of this work.
4. This reading appears to be supported by Rapture (1944), in which the
euphoria of the title is linked to the radiant heat of a sunflower-sun.
5. Nicole Edelman makes the point that the social status possible for women
mediums in the mid-nineteenth century exceeded what they might otherwise
achieve, for the most part (89). Emily St. Aubert resists pressure from her
aunt’s dangerous and powerful husband, Montoni, to sign over her property
to him because she has faith that her own resourcefulness will liberate her.
6. Baroque space “arises from a contradiction,” explains Wylie Sypher,
“first, setting monumental limits, then, immediately, denying these limits
by melodramatically opening a vista beyond them, thus seeming to perform
a heroic feat of liberation. Infinity is the boldest baroque illusion. Actually,
however, baroque encloses its areas firmly” (214).
7. This fact is mentioned in the Philadelphia Museum of Art brochure
Dorothea Tanning: Birthday and Beyond (2000), henceforth cited in the text
as Tanning: Birthday and Beyond.
8. My thanks to Ron Gault for our conversation in January 2002 about
Tanning’s work, and Birthday in particular.
9. Linda Nochlin biographically interprets as “isolation” what I see as calm
hesitation, a figure caught between coming and going: “the overwhelming
isolation of woman — the woman artist, and Dorothea Tanning in particular,
one suspects” (128).
10. Breton uses the expression “sublime point” in Mad Love (114), although
he already suggests it in the “Second Manifesto of Surrealism”: “Everything
tends to make us believe that there exists a certain point of the mind at
which life and death, the real and the imagined, past and future, the com-
municable and the incommunicable, high and low, cease to be perceived as
contradictions” (Manifestoes 123).
11. For more on the surrealist conversation, see my Robert Desnos and
“La Nature double.”
12. See my Automatic Woman for more on the spiral shape of Breton’s
narratives. For more on Breton’s “door ajar” and women, see Lusty.

13. The name Medusa is derived from the Greek verb medo, which means
“to guard,” leading to the feminine noun form guardian; it has a deponent
form, medomai, which became meditor in Latin, meaning “to think,” “to
contemplate.” Since our present-day understanding of mythology rests on
both traditions, it seems possible that some conflation can be considered in
the impression made by Medusa’s name, by what makes her fearsome. My
thanks to Hakan Tell for help with the etymology, particularly distinctions
between the Greek and Latin; the link is my own. See Chantraine.
14. For more on women and the serpent’s knowledge in the work of
women surrealists, see my Automatic Woman and also “La Nature double.”
15. At least two other works feature Tanning’s hair-mops. Fatala (1947)
shows a woman opening a book featuring a head of hair resembling a mop
and two mop heads. Le Petit Marquis (1947) shows a young marquis with a
whip in a gothic setting standing in a giant casket on whose inside lid hang
two heads of hair alongside two mop heads that resemble them.
16. In the painting Guardian Angels from 1946, legs protruding from giant
wings appear to witness a less benign fate, of capture or rape and not at all
self-propelled. Here the leg-wing seems much more under the control of
the woman to whose body it remains attached and represents her strength
and determination.
17. Bailly also notes this oscillation between extremes in Tanning’s work:
“Tanning’s painting oscillates between an immobility, a frozen instant, caught
like the flash of an unauthorized photographer . . . and headlong impulses
that apparently seek to invade the picture’s surface” (18).
18. Bataille insists that the true resemblance between virginal girls and
flowers lies in what they hide, in the seduction of their sexuality, which is
linked directly to mortality (Visions 10–14).
19. See Chénieux-Gendron, “L’envers,” for more on this theme in surrealism.
20. In the accompanying dictionary definition of the mouth, Bataille
characterizes the animal mouth as the “prow” of the body, which human
mouths imitate in times of great distress, when the head is raised and the
person cries out. Bataille suggests that the mouth is thus one of the more
animal-like human body parts, even though it is associated with the disem-
bodied erudition of thought (“Critical” 62–64).
21. The story of this encounter and Ernst’s subsequent divorce from Gug-
genheim is told both by Tanning in her autobiographies and by Guggenheim
in her engaging autobiography, Art of This Century.

22. Jouffroy called her turn to sculpture “inevitable” (68). More recently
John Russell declared, “There had been from the very beginning a sculptural
element in the work of Dorothea Tanning” (27).
23. She said, “Painting them, I felt like a choreography” (Tanning: Birth-
day and Beyond).
24. See her Avatar (1947) for a representation of the transport of dreams.
25. Anthony Shelton makes a compelling (if historically unproven) argu-
ment for Kongolese nkisi or “nail fetishes” having “emerged from a synthesis
of Kongo and Christian beliefs”: “Among the first examples of ‘fetish’ figures
from the Kongo to be described in the modern literature . . . were not indig-
enous styled carvings but appropriations of Christian images,” particularly
of Christ nailed to the cross (20).
26. Interview with the author, January 6, 2002.
27. Interview with the author.
28. Caws points out that Tanning is standing in most of her self-portraits,
whether identified as such or not: “In these dynamic renderings no reclining
is possible” (Surrealist 89).
29. Tzara’s haptic aesthetic also had a political dimension, as Adam Jolles
explains. He saw it as a means of arguing in favor of surrealism’s anti-impe-
rialist politics by turning away from the domineering gaze emblematic of the
colonialist’s view of the colonized subject to a different sense (Jolles 18–19).
6. Francesca Woodman’s Ghostly Interior Maps

1. “Rather than belonging to a tradition of the Gothic where she meditates
upon entombment and death,” writes Townsend, “her images appear to be
the very opposite — deliberately toying with Gothic figures as metaphors
for photographic encryption in order to stress her liberation from it” (27).
2. The images of places in Nadja resemble in style the turn-of-the-century
work of Eugène Atget, who also photographed Paris as peculiarly empty.
3. James Clifford compares this strategy with that of anthropology (121).
4. Krzysztof Ziarek makes a similar claim that avant-garde art relies on
presenting experience as uncontainable.
5. See Sypher 214. See also chapter 5, note 6.
6. Desnos’s sense of time was fundamentally baroque; see my Robert Des-
nos. For more on the baroque as a “methodological lever,” see Maffesoli 154.
7. See my “Anamorphic Love.”

8. The owners of the Maldoror Gallery in Rome who contributed to her
knowledge of surrealism commented: “For her surrealism meant Maldoror,
even after she’d gone back to New York. . . . We understood each other through
pictures” (in Townsend 32–33). See Pedicini 117–21. See also chapter 5, note
20, with regard to the Roman photographs against a wall.
9. See also Krauss, “Photographic” 110.
10. These essays could be understood as early explorations of what Fou-
cault later called practices of the self, since they focus on experiencing the
self in a way that Woodman’s work, seen together with Foucault’s, teases
out. Foucault identifies transgression as a moment when “the limit opens
violently onto the limitless” and emerges from sexuality and its language
(Aesthetics 73). Foucault also links the experience of the limit through an
experience of transgression to the death of God (“A Preface to Transgres-
sion” in Aesthetics). As such, it is a study of the sexually aware self hovering
between embodiment and disappearance. Woodman is more Bretonian than
Bataillian, I would argue, as her work presents more of a mysterious state
of being than a raw, naked one, despite her nudity in many of the images.
11. It is likely that Woodman knew the photography of Man Ray, of all the
surrealists. For more critics who confirm her visual relation to surrealism,
see Townsend 7, 19, 28–37; Strauss 124–33; Solomon-Godeau, “Just” 11–35;
F. K. Miller; Posner; and Riches.
12. This was arguably the idea that first spurred Claude Cahun to take
photographs of her head in a bell jar and inspired Ray and Lee Miller to
follow suit: of a life force that even decapitation could not contain within
mortality’s unsentimental chronology.
13. Caws argues that Desnos embodies “the shape-shifting tenets of the
baroque,” in other words, “an image that faces both ways, crossing the bound-
aries of expectation both public and private” (Surrealist 303, 311).
14. For more on the surrealist fascination with seeing the world inside
out, see Chénieux-Gendron, “L’envers”; chapter 5, note 20.
15. Artaud ends his critique of theater that relies on words without gestures
with the devastating gestures made by a person burned alive at the stake
(probably inspired by his work on Carl Dreyer’s 1928 film The Passion of Joan
of Arc): “And if there is still one hellish, truly accursed thing in our time, it
is our artistic dallying with forms, instead of being like victims burnt at the
stake, signaling through the flames” (“Theater” 13).

16. Benjamin Buchloh notes that a “shift towards the performative subject
(partially under the impact of a rediscovery of the Duchampian legacy)
emerged in American art of the mid to late 1960s” (42).
17. Breton’s poem from 1923, “Tournesol” (“Sunflower”), later analyzed in
Mad Love, also evokes an everyday reality that permits glimpses into another
dimension (see my “Anamorphic Love,” note 30).
7. Pierre Alechinsky’s Ghostly Palimpsests

1. The Absolute Divide, the 11th (and Last) International Exhibition of Sur-
realism at L’Oeil Gallery. See Draguet 40.
2. Alechinsky attended La Cambre, Belgium’s National Higher School of
Architecture and Decorative Arts, where he studied engraving and typog-
raphy (Draguet 13).
3. Cobra was created at a meeting in the café de l’Hôtel Notre-Dame in
Paris on November 8, 1948. The Belgian poet Christian Dotremont, a leader
from the beginning, that very day wrote the founding document of Cobra
with Asger Jorn (who was Danish), Karl Appel and Constant Nieuwenhuys
(who were Dutch), the artist who went by the name Corneille, and the fellow
Belgian Joseph Noiret. Other members who joined afterward included the
Dutch artist Carl-Henning Pedersen, the French artist Jean-Michel Atlan,
and the Belgians Pol Bury and Alechinsky. Most members were sympathetic
to Marxist ideas, like most young artists of their generation, but during
Cobra they rejected communism because of the socialist realism imposed
on artists and writers by the Muscovite Stalinist theoretician Andreï Jdanov.
Constant’s “Manifesto” of 1948, originally written under the auspices of the
Reflex avant-garde movement, which prefigured Cobra, represents a clear
break with surrealist automatism and replaces Breton’s guiding theory with
the new concept of “spontaneity.”
4. Interview with the author in Bougival, May 21, 2005. I thank Pierre and
Micky Alechinsky for their warm hospitality. The treaty that first established
Bénélux as a legal entity, the Benelux Customs Union, entered into force in
1947, a year before Cobra was established, and ceased to exist in 1960, when
it was replaced by the Benelux Economic Union.
5. Jorn, the Danish wise man of the Cobra group, mocked surrealist
automatism in the first issue of the journal Cobra, criticizing it for being
metaphysical and not materialist. As discussed in chapter 6, Breton had
emphasized the concept of purity in his original definition in the “Mani-
festo”: “psychic automatism in its pure state” (Manifestoes 26). Only in the

photograph Ecriture automatique, published on the cover of La révolution
surréaliste (1927), is the body of a woman used to signify the body’s involve-
ment in taking the dictation of the surrealist voice. Cobra’s poet, Chris-
tian Dotremont, said that “automatism prompted received wisdom to pop
out automatically, to the detriment of surprise” (“L’automatisme fait sortir
automatiquement les idées reçues au detriment de la surprise”). Author’s
interview with Alechinsky.
6. Constant Nieuwenhuys’s “Manifesto” emerged first out of the Reflex
group and was originally published in Reflex 1, Amsterdam, September–Oc-
tober 1948. See Stokvis 29–31.
7. Alechinsky’s statements about painting as an “interior writing” parallels
Breton’s contention in Surrealism and Painting that the artist needs to follow
a “purely internal model” (5).
10. By copying the outsider artist August Natterer’s Miracle Shepherd on
the cover of the number of Cahiers d’Art that featured his autobiographic
essay, “Beyond Painting” (1936), Ernst paid him the highest possible compli-
ment (Ecritures 236; Prinzhorn 169).
11. Bettina Brand-Clausen makes the point that Prinzhorn, who had
studied art history and admired modernism, actively encouraged his patients
to make art (10). See also MacGregor (chap. 12).
12. My thanks to Pierre Alechinsky for this and other clarifications in our
correspondence in July 2011.
13. It was a mode of mental travel he pursued for the remainder of the
decade, distinct from what the Situationists called “psycho-geography” in
the 1950s. Draguet explains: “Without succumbing to the psycho-geography
so dear to the Situationists, P. A. grasped the map as a new support that he
needed to deal with to free its imaginary world” (227). Jorn and Constant
joined the Situationist International in the 1950s, but not Alechinsky.
14. Alechinsky then tells a wry story about his stationer, who supplies
him with old papers: “‘We follow obituaries,’ he replied. ‘As soon as one of
our clients like you dies, we write to the widow’” (“Castles” n.p.).
15. Alechinsky was no doubt familiar with a surrealist precedent for draw-
ing on old printed paper: Yves Tanguy’s fanciful drawings on pages from an
old dictionary of proper names reproduced in Documents 34, for example
(in the same issue as Breton’s “Equation de l’objet trouvé”). Tanguy uses
small illustrations on the dictionary pages to make humorous drawings

that serve as commentaries as much as illustrations of the proper names
they accompany. His reformulations of legends become irreverent jokes that
work like puns. The comic drawings play against the exaggerated stories of
bravery and genius in a visual reworking of the idea embedded in Cahun’s
“Heroines” that all heroes have feet of clay, human habits, and foibles. My
thanks to Adam Jolles for reminding me of this text and its illustrations.
17. Interview with the author. Duchamp’s poem plays on the punning
resemblance in French between “exquisite words” and “Eskimos”: “Rrose
Sélavy et moi estimons les ecchymoses des Esquimaux aux mots exquis”
(“Rrose Sélavy and I esteem the bruises of Eskimos whose words are exqui-
site”). This version is from Pierre de Massot’s The Wonderful Book (1924).
Another version replaces estimons (esteem) with esquivons (evade). See
Duchamp 99, note 2.
18. Hélène Cixous comments that one could read all of Alechinsky’s work
as a “magnificent allegory of the life and death of a much loved Father”
(“Voyage” 32, my translation).
19. Alechinsky explained his conviction that the Gilles figure was greatly
influenced by the Spanish conquests, perhaps as a modification of a more
ancient figure (correspondence with the author, July 2011). He insists that
there exists an “immense” Spanish influence in Belgium, including in the
language. For historical documentation, see Albert Marinus, the director of
historic and folkloric research for the Belgian county of Brabant, in Glotz’s
undated study Le Carnaval de Binche: “People from Binche, conserve your
old Gilles just like he is! He crystallizes memories from several generations.
He is the concrete and living symbol of the ancient Carnival” (8, my transla-
tion). Jacques Huyen agrees with Glotz’s contention that the legend linking
the Gilles to Marie of Hungary arose only in the nineteenth century (24–28).
20. See chapter 2 of part 5, “The One Will Kill the Other,” in which Hugo
insists, “The book will destroy the building” (191).
21. The Northern and Southern Netherlands under the Spanish Habsburgs
were divided by religion: the northern region became increasingly Protestant,
while the south remained Catholic. See Stallaerts.
8. Susan Hiller’s Freudian Ghosts

1. The epigraph comes from my notes taken during Hiller’s talk at West
Dean College. The edited version that appeared in Papers of Surrealism reads
slightly differently because she describes more prosaically how she was “led

. . . to look again at surrealism and the repressed history of automatism
within modernism” (Malbert 4).
2. Malbert cites Hiller giving the date as 1971 in the West Dean interview,
later published in Papers of Surrealism 5 (2007).
3. In “Analysis and Ecstasy,” Brett asserts Hiller’s combination of sur-
realist and spiritualist practice in Sisters of Menon: “The ‘sisters of Menon’
identify themselves as authors of the words, at the same time as Hiller, in
her commentary, identifies them as part of a wider and truer understanding
of herself ” (in Lingwood 37).
4. Hiller elaborates, “At that time of course, the early seventies, surreal-
ism in terms of conceptual practice was really a sort of dirty word. No one
talked about surrealism, no one evoked it, it wasn’t a meaningful model for
anybody. It was considered rather embarrassing, and that interested me”
(in Malbert 4).
5. Hiller explains, “In anthropology, women as well as men go out and
study other people, but they are all really studying the culture from the
point of view of the men, so that you end up with a completely lop-sided,
patriarchal world view, which is fed back into the most reactionary kind of
thinking in our own society” (in Tuttle 122).
6. She does this literally in her white-on-black From India to the Planet
Mars (1997–2004), a series of “illuminated photo-transparencies of obscure
calligraphies,” which refer to the nineteenth-century medium Elise Mueller,
known as Hélène Smith, to whom Breton refers in Nadja, whose drawings
he included in “The Automatic Message” and who was commemorated in
Théodore Fournoy’s 1899 book, From India to the Planet Mars. The white
scribbled handwriting lit up against the black screens looks like something
a medium or a person in an automatic trance might produce, at once clear
and completely obscure.
7. She rejects the ethnographic assumption that the ethnographer is dif-
ferent from what he or she observes, stating that it is “not possible” that
her current practice has anything to do with ethnography: “The basis of
ethnography is in colonialism and the study of others from a superior po-
sition and that isn’t what I do. . . . I make complex, embodied, large scale
works, not academic texts. I’m always offended when people say that it is
[anthropological] because that’s a way of saying it’s not art and if it isn’t art,
it isn’t anything” (in Malbert 18).
8. In “Thought Burned Alive,” Denise Robinson gives the original number
as twenty-two and the final as forty-four. Sue Hubbard claims the original

display included twenty-five boxes. Hiller’s homepage gives the dates and
quantities I use here.
9. Alain Badiou summarizes the postmodern philosophy as proposing
“to dissolve the great constructions of the nineteenth century to which we
remain captive — the idea of the historical subject, the idea of progress, the
idea of revolution, the idea of humanity and the ideal of science. Its aim
is to show that these great constructions are outdated, that we live in the
multiple, that there are no great epics of history or of thought; that there is
an irreduceable plurality of registers and languages in thought as in action;
registers so diverse and heterogeneous that no great idea can totalize or
reconcile them” (32–33).
10. Without the comparison to sentence structures, Hubbard has made
a similar observation: “Meaning, therefore, resided in the interrelationships
between the objects within each box, between the boxes within the series
and the positioning of the boxes within the museum. These relationships
also suggested a number of other conjunctions such as fact and fiction, life
and death, superstition and empiricism” (33).
11. All the box numbers in this chapter come from After the Freud Museum.
12. I have been told that this myth does not exist and must have been
invented by Hiller. Since this entire work is about cultural myths beginning
with Freud and about the ways we misremember them according to our
own psychic needs, this invention may be seen as just another layer in the
psychic geography Hiller lays out for her audience.
13. In another box playfully titled Sophia (019), Hiller displays waters from
Dodona, where Zeus’s oracle worked; Delphi, where the waters are linked
to Artemis Brauronia and her nearby temple; and water from Tobar Cooey
in Ireland, which is purported to restore sight or grant insight.
14. See Gamwell and Wells; Fuss.
15. Carolyn Stedman explains that Derrida’s Archive Fever explores “Freud’s
own attempts to find adequate metaphors for representing memory. Derrida
sees in Freud’s writing the very desire that is Archive Fever: the desire to
recover moments of inception: to find and possess all sorts of beginnings” (5).
She goes on to explain, “Derrida names as a sickness, a movement towards
death. Moreover, he reiterated here, to want to make an archive in the first
place, is to want to repeat, and one of Freud’s clearest lessons was that the
compulsion to repeat is the drive towards death” (6).
16. Derrida effectively bypasses Foucault in his reasoning. When Foucault
described the archive, he left out its psychological dimension. He described

the archive in terms of time and space, as “the border of time that surrounds
our presence, which overhangs it, and which indicates it in its otherness;
it is that which, outside ourselves, delimits us” (Archaeology 130). Derrida
argues that it is the psychological dimension that makes us want to fix that
original moment in time and space where the archive ought to begin and
that that original moment cannot possibly be defined or situated. Thus the
archive exists only in the theory of psychoanalysis because at its root the
archive is fundamentally psychological.
17. Hiller notes that white Americans also expressed admiration for Native
American shamanistic practices such as sand painting. She refers specifically
to Jackson Pollock, whose admiration for Native American shamanism was
highlighted in a 2008–09 exhibition in Paris, Pollock and Shamanism (cor-
respondence with the author, July 2011). I am grateful to Susan Hiller for
bringing this connection to my attention. See also Deloria.
Notes to page 222 255

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Index
Page numbers in italics refer to Cobra (journal), 181; and Cobra

illustrations. “Manifesto,” 197–98; and Cobra
movement, 177, 179–80, 181,
Absolute Divide, 250n1 188–90, 194, 197, 199; and the
Abyss (Tanning), 122–23, 125, 128, Crimea, 188; and dance, 190; and
132, 145 doubling, 187; and France, 189;
Adamowicz, Elza, 32, 61, 77, 78; and ghost of spiritualism, 198;
“Bodies Cut and Dissolved,” and ghost of surrealism, 187, 199;
235n8; “Claude Cahun and ghosts, 180, 184, 185, 188,
surréaliste,” 239n26 189, 194; and Gilles character,
Ades, Dawn, 59, 235n4, 241n3 190–91, 192; and Gilles dancers,
African objects, 10, 27, 34, 42, 77; 184, 189, 190; and Hunchback of
as art, 203; as fetishes, 75; and Notre Dame, 191; and Japanese
masks, 75–77, 80; and nkisi, 144, painting, 185; and Jean Lefebre,
248n25; and sculpture, 34, 76, 186; maps and, 179–80, 187, 188,
77; as surrealist objects, 29, 144; 189, 196, 208; and marginal
Susan Hiller and, 203 “remarks,” 179, 183, 185–86; and
After the Freud Museum (Hiller), meditated receptivity, 185; as
206, 218, 223 medium, 192; and palimpsests,
Agar, Eileen, 115 180, 192, 198, 199; and Paris,
“The Age of Light” (Ray), 38 198; and postmodernism,
Alechinsky, Micky, 250n4 208; predellas of, 183; psychic
Alechinsky, Pierre, 6, 177, geography of, 199; and Sengaï,
179–200, 250n2, 250n4; and 185, 199; show of, at Guggenheim
anamorphosis, 187; and André Museum, 184; and spontaneity,
Breton, 179, 185, 198, 194; and Art 188; and surrealism, 177, 180, 187,
Brut, 182, 186; and automatism, 199; and surrealist automatism,
180, 184, 198, 199; and Belgium, 185, 188, 198; and surrealist
181, 189, 194; and Carnaval de ghostliness, 179, 180, 183–89, 199;
Binche, 184, 189, 191, 198; and and suspension and flow, 185–88,
275
Alechinsky, Pierre (continued) Woodman and, 155–56, 168; and
190; and textual puns, 183; ghostliness, 15, 19; and ghosts,
and touch, 183; training of, as 156; Lee Miller and, 94, 97–98,
printer, 179; and transformation, 114–15, 116, 168; Man Ray and,
196; and tribute to “Rrose 30, 33, 168; Pierre Alechinsky
Sélavy” poems, 188; and visual and, 187; Salvador Dalí and, 15,
puns, 183; and Walasse Ting, 73, 75, 81
184–85; writerly borders of, 183 Anatomies (Ray), 245n9
Alechinsky, Pierre, works of: Andreó, Benjamin, 234n15
Central Park, 179, 180, 185, 186– the androgyne, 131
87, 186, 198; Exquisite Words, Animal That Therefore I Am
188; Page d’atlas universel (I–X), (Derrida), 237n1
179–80, 188–200, 193, 195, 202; Another Language of Flowers
Roue libre (Free Wheel), 184–85 (Tanning), 150
Alexander (the Great), 192, 196 anthropology, 203, 204, 205, 253n5.
Alice (character), 124, 184, 187 See also ethnography
Allmer, Patricia, 245n14 Antle, Martine, 242n12
Aloyse, 233n5 Antomarini, Brunella, 171–72
Altman, Meryl, 242n12 Apollinaire, Guillaume, xi, xii, 1,
The Ambassadors (Holbein), xii– 233n1; “The Pretty Redhead,”
xiii, xiii, xv, 7, 14, 38, 51, 57, 152, 227
167, 228; as anamorphic icon, Apparition of Face and Fruit Dish
167; anamorphosis in, 14, 73, on a Beach (Dalí), 241n8
116, 176; and André Breton, 14; Appel, Karl, 250n3
and Jacques Lacan, 16; skull in, Aragon, Louis, 6, 28, 242n18;
15, 16, 58, 73, 156 “Challenge to Painting,” 233n6;
Amstrong, Carol, 239n22 “Wave of Dreams,” 233n6
“Analysis and Ecstasy” (Brett), the archive, 54, 62, 81, 83, 212–13,
253n3 219, 224, 228, 254n16; and
“Anamorphic Love” (Conley), Archive Fever, 7, 9, 46–47,
248n7, 250n17 213–14, 215, 254n15; and bell
anamorphosis, xi, xiii–xv, jars, 47; Claude Cahun and, 45,
14, 41, 73, 86, 131; and The 56, 62–63; and counter-archives,
Ambassadors, xii, 14, 73, 46, 62, 70, 104; and ghostliness,
116, 176; and anamorphic 47; ghost of, 213; objects as, 205;
impressions, 155–56; Brassaï and surrealist ghostliness, 8–9,
and, 69, 73, 81, 168; and 201, 228; Susan Hiller and, 201,
doubling, 14, 86; Francesca 205; and suspension and flow, 8
276 Index
Archive Fever (Derrida), 7, 9, automatic objects, 70; and
46–47, 213–14, 215, 254n15 automatic practice, 8, 180; and
Artaud, Antonin, 28, 87, 173, bodies, 16; and body-objects,
249n15 17; Claude Cahun and, 159;
Art Brut, 4, 182 Cobra movement and, 181,
Artistry of the Mentally Ill 199; Dorothea Tanning and,
(Prinzhorn), 182 127, 159; and found objects,
Art Journal, 100 209; Francesca Woodman and,
Art Nouveau, 76, 80, 84, 88. See 155, 159, 166; and gender, 159;
also Modern Style Lee Miller and, 159; Michel
Art of This Century (Guggenheim), Foucault and, 121; Pierre
247n21 Alechinsky and, 180, 184; and
A’shiwi (Hiller), 221 rhythm of automatism, 8, 33;
Atget, Eugène, 39, 45, 245n16, spontaneity as response to, 181;
248n2 Susan Hiller and, 203, 204; and
Atlan, Jean-Michel, 250n3 suspension and flow, 8. See also
At the Freud Museum (Hiller), 202, surrealist automatism
205–06, 207 Avatar (Tanning), 248n24
attraction-repulsion, 84, 85
aura, 11, 12, 26, 27, 75, 218, 219, 229 Bachelors (Krauss), 237n2, 240n31
authenticity, 77 Bacon, Francis, 151, 173
automatic experience, 5, 16, 159. Badiou, Alain, 254n9
See also automatism Bailly, Jean-Christophe, 242n2,
“The Automatic Message” 247n17
(Breton), 3, 5, 6, 75–78, 182, 184, Baker, George, 155
208, 253n6 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 191
automatic sleeps, 13. See also Bal, Mieke, 55, 238n14
automatism the baroque, 6, 69–70, 78, 86,
automatic trances, xi, 13, 16, 120. 130, 242n13; and baroque
See also automatism space, 129, 148, 169, 246n6;
Automatic Woman (Conley), xv, Dorothea Tanning and, 148;
238n10, 246n12, 247n14 and doubleness, 148; Francesca
automatic writing, 79, 158, 159, Woodman and, 6, 151, 154, 155,
165, 166, 173, 202–04. See also 163; Robert Desnos and, 155,
automatism 169, 249n6; sculpture and, 82;
automatism, 1, 3, 5, 79, 200, 208, and surrealist anamorphosis,
229; André Breton and, 1, 15. See also Sicilian baroque;
2, 76, 120, 121, 158, 165; and surrealist baroque
Index 277
Barthes, Roland, 51–52, 57, 238n21, Berne, Betsy, 163, 166
241n35; Camera Lucida, 48–49 Berranger, Marie-Paule, 14
Bataille, Georges, 61, 167, Berton, Germaine, 223
243n20, 247n18, 247n20; and Between Lives (Tanning), 132, 133,
attraction-repulsion, 84, 85; 142, 149
and base materialism, 10; Bey, Aziz Eloui, 98
and declassification, 62; and “Beyond Painting” (Ernst), 12,
Documents, 61, 141; and the 233n6, 235n6, 251n10
informe, 61; “The Language of Birthday (memoir) (Tanning), 132,
Flowers,” 141, 242n14; and the 133
sacred, 86 Birthday (painting) (Tanning),
Batchen, Geoffrey, 62, 99, 240n32 129–33, 129, 135, 142
Bate, David, 239n23, 240n34 Blossfeldt, Karl, 79, 242n14
bell jar, 47, 53–54, 94; as archive, “Bodies Cut and Dissolved”
47; Claude Cahun and, 47, (Adamowicz), 235n8
49, 50, 52, 53–54, 92–94; and body-tent, 110, 112, 155. See also
ghostliness, 53, 56, 95; and corporeal puns
headlessness, 49–51, 56; Lee Boiffard, Jacques-André, 141
Miller and, 91–95, 97, 138; Man Bottlerack (Duchamp), 9, 10, 10, 18,
Ray and, 48; and mortality, 54; 77, 80, 81, 207
as object, 47; and photography, Bourgeade, Pierre, 22
47, 56, 95; as theme, 47 Bousquet, Alain, 149
Benjamin, Walter, 11, 27, 29, 40, Brand-Clausen, Bettina, 251n11
72, 88, 218–19, 222; and aura, Brassaï, 5, 45, 67, 69–89, 104, 218,
11, 12, 218, 229; and profane 241n5; and anamorphosis, 69,
illumination, 72, 78; Susan 73, 81, 168; and the baroque, 78;
Hiller on, 218–19, 220; works collaboration of, with Salvador
of, as surrealist objects, 29; and Dalí, 69–71; and doubling, 78;
World War II, 221 and ethnographic thinking,
Benjamin, Walter, works of: “On 75; and ethnography, 71–72,
Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” 12, 205; and found objects, 5; and
27; “Surrealism, the Last Snapshot ghostliness, 5, 71, 72; and graffiti
of the European Intelligentsia,” art, 75–76, 78; Involuntary
243n1; “Theses on the Philosophy Sculptures (Sculptures
of History,” 219; “Unpacking My involontaires), 67, 69–71, 70, 72,
Library,” 29, 218–19; “The Work of 78–82, 87, 104, 207, 241n1; and
Art in the Age of Reproduction,” magnification, 87; and Sicilian
11, 27, 75, 218 baroque, 69–70; and spirit
278 Index
photography, 53; and surrealist surrealism, xi, 1–5, 6, 182; and
objects, 76 surrealist ghostliness, 116–17;
Brauer, Florence, 233n33 and “unsilvered glass,” 110, 225.
Breton, André, 13, 28, 32, 40, 41, See also Bretonian automatism;
44, 62, 74, 135, 164, 176, 183, Bretonian surrealism
184, 210, 212, 224–27, 243n19; Breton, André, works of: Arcanum,
admiration of, for Melusina, 17, 133; “The Automatic
153; on The Ambassadors, 14; Message,” 3, 5, 6, 75–78, 182,
and anamorphosis, 14–15; and 184, 208, 253n6; “Crisis of
automatic trances, 120; and the Object,” 18, 78, 235n6;
automatic writing, 79, 158; “Equation de l’objet trouvé,”
and automatism, 1, 2, 76, 121, 236n22, 251n15; “The Fiftieth
158, 165; and “books left ajar,” Anniversary of Hysteria,”
133, 134, 246n12; and clouds, 242n18; “Introduction to the
107–08; and Compagnie de Discourse on the Paucity of
l’Art Brut, 4; and convulsive Reality,” 41; L’Art Magique, 14;
beauty, 84, 235n6; and corporeal “Le Surréalisme et la peinture,”
puns, 24, 67; and Dancer/ 236n12; “L’Objet fantôme,”
Danger, 42; and Documents, 38, 41; Mad Love, 42, 107–08,
251n15; and doubling, 15; and 135, 138, 236n16, 241n4; The
fairy tales, 120, 122, 245n1; and Magnetic Fields, 3, 66, 110, 199,
force fields, 78; and Francesca 225; “Manifesto of Surrealism,”
Woodman, 153; and gender, xi, 2, 6, 16, 18, 32, 39, 61, 97,
126–27; and the ghostly, 153; 120, 122, 136, 142, 149, 158, 160,
and gothic fiction, 120, 122; and 181, 183, 250n5; “The Mediums
latencies, 18, 78; and Lee Miller, Enter,” 1, 3; Nadja, 38, 63,
108, 114; and mediumistic 84, 133, 138, 153, 165, 248n2,
art, 76; and Modern Style, 253n6; “Second Manifesto
76; and The Monk, 122; and of Surrealism,” xi, 246n10;
objects, 17, 34, 77, 117, 208–09; “Sunflower,” 127, 250n17;
and Paris flea market, 42; and Surrealism and Painting, 4, 37,
Pierre Alechinsky, 179, 185, 114, 233n3, 234n16, 251n7; “What
198; and primitive flow, 76, 78; Is Surrealism?” 234n20
and recording instruments, “Breton caresse les ours blancs”
16, 49, 66, 120, 140, 158; (Colvile), 245n13
and spiritualism, 1, 5; and Bretonian automatism, 121, 159, 165
subliminal messages, 5; and Bretonian surrealism, 4, 12, 61, 104,
the supernatural, 123; and 134–35, 142, 153, 200, 221
Index 279
Brett, Guy: “Analysis and Ecstasy,” “Heroines,” 54–56, 134, 238n15,
253n3 252n15; Human Frontier
Buchloh, Benjamin, 250n16 (Frontière humaine), 5, 55–63,
Buci-Glucksmann, Christine, 58, 65, 66, 239n29; Untitled, 50
242n13 Camera Lucida (Barthes), 48–49
Burke, Carolyn, 98, 100, 102, 105, Canapé en temps de pluie (Rainy-
112, 245n11 Day Canapé) (Tanning),
Bury, Pol, 250n3 145–46, 146
Butler, Judith: Gender Trouble, Cardinal, Roger, 3, 72, 182
60–61 carnival, 189, 190, 191, 194, 198
Carroll, Lewis, 124
Cahiers d’art, 234n16, 235n6, 251n10 Caws, Mary Ann, 131, 133, 244n3,
Cahun, Claude, 5, 44, 45–67, 77, 91, 245n12, 248n28, 249n13; “Ladies
108, 131, 238n18, 239n25, 240n31; Shot and Painted,” 237n6
and angels, 50–51; and the Central Park, 186
archive, 56, 57; and automatic Central Park (Alechinsky), 179,
experience, 159; and bell jar 180, 185, 186–87, 186, 198
photographs, 2, 47, 49, 50–52, Chadwick, Whitney, 99, 119,
53–54, 56, 64, 92–94, 249n12; 239n28
and Bretonian surrealism, 61; Chaissac, Gaston, 182
and doubling, 9, 45, 63, 64, “Challenge to Painting” (Aragon),
66; friendship of, with Robert 233n6
Desnos, 48; and gender, 50, Champs délicieux (Rayogram)
60–61; and ghostliness, 48, 53, (Ray), 24
56, 64; and ghosts, 45, 52, 56, chance, 39, 43, 135, 138, 202, 207,
63, 65, 134; and headlessness, 230
50–56; and Le Journal littéraire, Chantraine, Pierre, 247n13
54; and Le Mercure de France, Charcot, Jean-Martin, 242n18
54; and masquerade, 60, 63; and Charles Ratton Gallery, 77, 81, 86
mortality, 52, 53, 57–58, 64; and Charles V (of Spain), 190
photomontages, 59–60; and self- Chasm (Tanning), 112, 119, 122, 123,
portraits, 9, 57, 71, 104; and spirit 246n1
photography, 53; and surrealism, Chénieux-Gendron, Jacqueline,
61, 204; and touch, 57–58, 60, 49, 50, 54, 247n19, 249n14
64; and transvestism, 61 Chéroux, Clément: The Perfect
Cahun, Claude, works of: Medium, 7
Disavowals (Aveux non avenus), Children’s Games (Tanning),
51, 56, 59–60, 59, 61, 62, 63–64; 123–25, 124, 140, 141, 143, 146
280 Index
City Gorged with Dreams (Walker), coexisting realities, 228. See also
58 doubling
Cixous, Hélène, 51, 252n18 collage, 9, 12, 60. See also
Clark, T. J., 19, 234n21 photomontage
“Claude Cahun’s Counter-Archival Collected Writings (Dalí), 241n7
Heroïnes” (Conley), 238n10 colonialist perspective, 106–07
“Claude Cahun surréaliste” Columbus, Christopher, 107
(Adamowicz), 239n26 Colvile, Georgiana, 107–08,
Clifford, James, 29, 72, 248n3 240n33; “Breton caresse les ours
The Cloud Factory (Sacks of blancs,” 245n13
Cotton) (Miller), 105–06, 105, Compagnie de l’Art Brut, 4. See
107, 108 also Art Brut
Cobra (journal), 181, 182, 184, 190, “Concerning a Certain Automatism
250n5 of Taste” (Tzara), 10, 78
Cobra movement, 177, 179–80, Conley, Katharine, works of:
181, 188, 189, 190, 194, 197; “Anamorphic Love,” 248n7,
and Art Brut, 182; Asger Jorn 250n17; Automatic Woman,
and, 250n3; Carl-Henning xv, 238n10, 246n12, 247n14;
Pedersen and, 250n3; Christian “Claude Cahun’s Counter-
Dotremont and, 184, 250n3; Archival Heroïnes,” 238n10; “La
creation of, 250n3; disbanding Nature double,” 246n11, 247n14;
of, 184; ghost of, 187; and ghost Robert Desnos, Surrealism, and
of surrealism, 189; Jean-Michel the Marvelous in Everyday Life,
Atlan and, 250n3; Joseph Noiret 246n11, 248n6; “Woman in the
and, 250n3; Karl Appel and, Bottle,” 236n17
250n3; as “Little Europe,” 181; corporeal puns, 14, 15–16, 17, 24;
“Manifesto” of, 181, 182, 197–98; as characteristic of surrealist
and Pierre Alechinsky, 177, 179– ghostliness, 15–17; in Les
80, 181, 188–90, 194, 197, 199; Pol Mystères du château du dé, 38; in
Bury and, 250n3; and rhythm Man Ray’s Self-Portrait, 24; Paul
and flow, 199; and spiritualism, Eluard’s body-house as, 16, 49,
182; and spontaneity, 181, 182, 66; Robert Desnos’s body-bottle
185, 188, 250n2; and surrealist as, 16, 49, 66. See also doubling;
automatism, 181; and surrealist puns; surrealist ghostliness
ghostliness, 182; and Surrealist Cottam, Daniel, 233n2
Revolutionary Group, 179 Cottingham, Laura, 237n8
Coeur à barbe (Bearded Heart) counter-archives, 46, 62, 70, 104.
(Tzara), 29 See also the archive
Index 281
Cowgirl (Hiller), 211, 222–23, 223 Sculptures (Sculptures
Crépin, Joseph, 233n5 involontaires), 67, 69–71, 70,
Crevel, René, 1, 25 72, 78–82, 87, 104, 207, 241n1;
“Crisis of the Object” (Breton), 18, “The Objects Revealed in
78, 235n6 Surrealist Experiment,” 82; The
Curie, Marie, 1 Phenomenon of Ecstasy, 243n23;
Curie, Pierre, 1 The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí,
243n21; “Surrealist Objects,”
dada, 1, 28, 41, 227 236n18; “The Terrifying and
Dakar-Djibouti mission, 71, 74, Edible Beauty of Modern Style
244n27 Architecture,” 80, 82
Dalí, Salvador, 5, 67, 69–89, 218, dance, 29, 30–31, 32, 70, 71, 88;
236n18, 237n4, 242n16, 243n18, Dorothea Tanning and, 142,
244n26; and anamorphosis, 143; Man Ray and, 29–32;
15, 72, 73, 75, 81; and Antonió Michel Leiris and, 85–86;
Gaudí, 84; and Art Nouveau, Pierre Alechinsky and, 190;
5; and attraction-repulsion, 82, and surrealist objects, 29; as
84, 85; collaboration of, with transformation, 72, 86
Brassaï, 67–69; and convulsive Dancer/Danger (Ray), 30, 42
beauty, 84; doubling in works Danto, Arthur, 175
of, 75–78, 97; and ethnography, Darnton, Robert, 2
71–72, 86; and Gala Eluard, Davison, Peter, 183
243n21; and ghostliness, Dean, Carolyn, 238n11, 239n29
5, 72; and ghosts, 86, 87; decapitation, 53, 55–56. See also
and magnification, 87; and headlessness
Minotaure, 82, 88; on Modern de Chirio, Giorgio, 39, 82
Style, 70, 75, 80, 82–83, 85–88, Deepwell, Katy, 240n30
243n23; and mortality, 83; in de Haas, Patrick, 31–32
Paris, 88, 89; and the phantom, Déjeuner sur l’herbe (Manet), 112
82, 84; and photography, 81, 111; Deleuze, Gilles, 242n13
and the spectral, 80, 82, 84; and Deloria, Philip, 255n17
surrealist ghostliness, 82, 89; de Mandiargues, André Pieyre, 134
and surrealist objects, 74–75 de Massot, Pierre: The Wonderful
Dalí, Salvador, works of: Book, 252n17
Apparition of Face and Fruit de Noailles, Charles, 38
Dish on a Beach, 241n8; Derrida, Jacques, 7, 9, 46, 237n1,
Collected Writings, 241n7; The 254nn15–16; Animal That
Invisible Man, 75; Involuntary Therefore I Am, 237n1; and the
282 Index
archive, 56, 62, 81, 104, 215, “Dogon Masks” (Leiris), 73–74
219, 254n16; Archive Fever, 7, 9, Doheny, Susan, 242n14
46–47, 213–14, 215, 254n15; and Domes of the Church of the Virgin
ghosts, 51; and photograms, (al Adhra), Deir el Soriano
104; and photography, 51, 104, Monastery (Miller), xiii,
110; and psychoanalysis, 215; 100–102, 101, 104, 106, 107
and rhythm of automatism, 9; domestic space, 6, 121, 137
and Roland Barthes, 51; and Donkey Skin, 245n1
Sigmund Freud, 215–16, 228; Doolittle, Hilda (H.D.), 213
Spectres of Marx, 7 Door (Tanning), 84, 146
de Sade, Marquis, 48, 49, 93 Dorothea Tanning: Birthday and
Desnos, Robert, xi, xiv, 24, 29, Beyond, 246nn7–8
36, 61, 96, 151, 169, 199, 233n6; Dorothea Tanning Foundation,
and automatic experience, 246n2
16–17; and the baroque, 155, 169, Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 2
249n13; and baroque space, 169; Dotremont, Christian, 184, 250n3,
body-bottle of, 155; corporeal 251n5
puns in work of, 16, 49, 67; doubling: xi, xv, 7, 21, 41, 43, 45,
doubleness in work of, 14, 80, 59, 71, 78, 86–88, 116; and
81; and Francesca Woodman, anamorphosis, 14, 86; and the
151, 154, 155, 169, 170, 176; and archive, 9; and the baroque, 148;
ghostliness, 16–17; and L’Etoile as characteristic of surrealist
de mer, 36, 237n15; punning ghostliness, 12–17, 54, 66, 75,
poems of, 14, 16, 49–50, 80, 148, 203, 216, 228, 229, 230;
184; as Rrose Sélavy, 13, 80, Claude Cahun and, 9, 63,
81, 84; “Rrose Sélavy” poems 64, 66; and corporeal puns,
of, xi, 13, 15, 29; and surrealist 14, 15–17; Dorothea Tanning
conversation, 6; “Third and, 148; and exquisite corpse
Manifesto of Surrealism,” 233n6 game, 14; Francesca Woodman
Desnosian surrealism, 200 and, 152; Lee Miller and, 96,
Didi-Hubermann, Georges, 30–31, 110–12, 116; Man Ray and, 21,
34, 35, 39, 43, 140, 236n17 25, 43; and masks, 63; and the
Disavowals (Aveux non avenus) Minotaur, 71; and photography,
(Cahun), 51, 56, 59–60, 59, 61, 54; Pierre Alechinsky and, 186,
62, 63–64 187; and suspension and flow,
Distortions (Kertesz), 239n22 8; textual puns as, 13, 14, 19, 80;
Documents, 236n22, 244n4, 251n15 visual puns as, 80
the Dogon, 70–71, 73–74, 86–88 Draguet, Michel, 251n13
Index 283
dream reality, xii, 76, 77, 142, 203, 9; and convulsive beauty, 84;
212–13, 217, 229, 230 Dorothea Tanning and, 122,
Dreyer, Carl: The Passion of Joan of 132, 139, 247n21; Effect of a
Arc, 249n15 Touch, 12; and non-Western
Dubuffet, Jean, 4, 182 sculpture, 144; and surrealist
Duchamp, Marcel, 13, 207, 218, conversation, 6
252n17; Bottlerack, 9, 10, 10, 18, ethnographic surrealism, 72
77, 80, 81, 207; and readymades, ethnographic thinking, 75, 241n9
9, 207; as Rrose Sélavy, 13, 24, ethnography, 65, 71–72, 86, 89, 107,
45, 46, 46, 188 205, 229
Dumas, Marie-Claire, 14 Eve (biblical figure), 134, 136
Durkheim, Émile, 243n20 Even the Young Girls (Tanning), 143
Durozoi, Gérard, 236n20 Everett, Wendy, 37, 43
Ενχη (Hiller), 211, 211
Eaux de vie (Hiller), 212 Exploding Hand (Miller), 95–96, 96
Eburne, Jonathan, 8 exquisite corpse game, 14, 15, 65,
Ecriture automatique, 159, 250n5 187
Edelman, Nicole, 246n5 Exquisite Words (Alechinsky), 188
Effect of a Touch (Ernst), 12
Eide, Marian, 213n10 Fabian, Johannes, 241n10
Eine Kleine Nacktmusik (Tanning), fairy tales, 120, 161–62, 175, 245n1
123, 125, 126, 127, 129, 140, 142 Fatala (Tanning), 247n15
Einstein, Carl: “Negro Sculpture,” Fer, Briony, 242n17
76 Fidelin, Ady, 112
Eluard, Gala, 243n21 “The Fiftieth Anniversary of
Eluard, Nusch, 112 Hysteria” (Breton), 242n18
Eluard, Paul, 49, 66, 77, 112, 227; Finkelstein, Haim, 241n7, 242n15
“The Word,” 16–17, 155 Fischer, Andreas: The Perfect
Emak Bakia (Ray), 5, 27, 33–36, 37, Medium, 7
40, 258n8 Flammarion, Camille, 1
The Encyclopedia of Jewish Floating Head, Portrait of Mary
Religion, 238n13 Taylor (Miller), 244n5
“Equation de l’objet trouvé” Forrester, John, 212
(Breton), 236n22, 251n15 Fotiade, Ramona, 28
Ernst, Max, 6, 12, 142, 227, 233n6, Foucault, Michel, 4, 25, 34, 166,
251n10; and Art Brut, 182; 176, 243n20, 249n10, 254n16;
“Beyond Painting,” 12, 233n6, and Bretonian automatism,
235n6, 251n10; and collage, 121, 159, 165; and Bretonian
284 Index
surrealism, 4, 8, 12, 153; and ghostliness, 201; Susan Hiller
surrealist automatism, 153; and, 201, 202, 209; and the
and “swimmer between two uncanny, 52, 230
worlds,” 8, 9, 34, 143, 153 From India to the Planet Mars
found objects, 9, 17, 69–81, 207, (Fournoy), 253n6
298, 207, 209 From India to the Planet Mars
Fournoy, Théodore: From India to (Hiller), 253n6
the Planet Mars, 253n6 From the Freud Museum (Hiller),
Franklin, Benjamin, 2 6, 201–03, 202, 205, 206, 207,
French Revolution, 49–50 211, 212, 214, 215, 220, 223, 224,
Freud, Sigmund, 1, 2, 4, 7, 51, 61, 225, 254n11
89, 207–12, 223, 224, 225; and From the Top of the Great Pyramid
ghosts, 207, 216; and Greek (Miller), xiv, 108, 112–13, 113,
mythology, 211, 212, 217, 224, 114–16
254n12; and hypnosis, 227; Führer (Hiller), 218
Jacques Derrida on, 215–16, 228; Fuss, Diana, 254n14
Jewish heritage of, 205, 218, 219;
London house of, 9, 201, 205, Gambill, Norman, 235n7
207, 217, 226; “magic writing Gamwell, Lynn, 254n14
pad” of, 215, 216, 219, 224, 225; Garber, Marjorie, 61
as modernist, 206; modernist Gasarian, Gérard, 107–08, 245n13
collection of, 201, 213, 214, 218, Gaudí, Antonió, 70, 82, 84, 85, 86,
222, 224; and objects, 212–13, 88
217–18; and Oedipus complex, Gault, Ron, 246n8
211; and primitive man, 210; gender, 120–21, 126–27;
psychic geography of, 205, automatism and, 159; Claude
218; and psychoanalytical Cahun and, 48, 50, 60–61;
method, 216–17; and theory of Dorothea Tanning and, 124–28;
the unconscious, 1, 7; Totem Francesca Woodman and, 159;
and Taboo, 209–10; and the Lee Miller and, 48, 91, 107; and
uncanny, 18, 52, 61; and World surrealism, 108, 159, 204; and
War II, 221 surrealist ghostliness, 91, 108
Freudianism, 4, 7, 202, 212; André Gender Trouble (Butler), 60–61
Breton and, 18; and doubleness, Getsy, David, 238n20
216; and fetishes, 144; and Ghostly Matters (Gordon), 7
ghostliness, 7; Jacques Derrida ghosts, xiv, 1, 6, 7, 33, 52, 56, 65, 86,
and, 46, 215; and surrealism, 87; in European history, 6; in
1, 4, 203; and surrealist film, 33; of spiritualism, 1, 5, 18,
Index 285
ghosts (continued) Hades (Hiller), 211
120, 131, 198, 203; of surrealism, Halasz, Gyula. See Brassaï
187, 189, 199. See also the Hansen, Miriam, 11, 12
spectral; surrealist ghostliness Harris, Steven, 70, 239n22, 240n34;
Giacometti, Alberto, 40, 42 Surrealist Art and Thought in
Gikandi, Simon, 244nn25–26; the 1930s, 241n2
“Picasso, Africa, and the Harvey, John, 52
Schemata of Difference,” Haworth-Booth, Mark, 245n14
244n26 headlessness, 48–50, 52, 53–56, 62,
Gilles dancers, 184, 189, 190, 191–98 92–95. See also decapitation
Glotz, Samuel, 190; La Carnaval de Hermann, Brigitte, 21–22, 26
Binche, 252n19 “Heroides” (Ovid), 54–56
Goldsborough, Kate, 244n9 “Heroines” (Cahun), 54–56, 134,
Gordon, Avery: Ghostly Matters, 7 238n15, 252n15
Gorgon (mythological figure). See Hiller, Susan, xiv, 6, 199, 201–26;
Medusa (mythological figure) and African art, 203; and
the gothic, 5, 46; André Breton ancient Greece, 221; André
and, 2; and Bretonian Breton’s influence on, 224–25;
surrealism, 2–5; Dorothea and anthropology, 203, 204,
Tanning and, 120, 122, 128, 205, 253n5; and the archive,
130; Francesca Woodman and, 201, 205, 213, 215, 225; and
151–52, 154, 162–63; and the automatic writing, 202–04;
gothic imagination, 3, 229; and chance, 202–03, 207; and
and the supernatural, 162; and dreams, 203, 209; education
surrealism, 5; and surrealist of, 203; and ethnography, 205;
ghostliness, 2–5 feminist sensibility of, 201, 204,
gothic architecture, 82, 83 225; and Freudianism, 201–03,
gothic fiction, 2, 3, 162 212; and ghostliness, 204, 205,
Greek mythology, 217, 224, 226 217; and ghost of spiritualism,
Greenberg, Clement, 242n16 203; and ghosts, 203, 205; and
Griaule, Marcel, 74 Greek mythology, 254n13; and
Grossman, Wendy, 235n10 “Indian Children” poem, 221;
Guardian Angels (Tanning), 146, and Ireland, 210, 254n13; Jewish
247n16 heritage of, 205, 218, 219, 223; and
Guggenheim, Peggy, 142; Art of masks, 209; and mortality, 207;
This Century, 247n21 and Native American culture,
Guggenheim Museum, 184 221–22, 255n17; and objects,
Guimard, Hector, 70, 82, 84, 88 205, 207–09, 210; postmodern
286 Index
collection of, 201, 207, 208, 217, Holbein, Hans (the Younger), xii,
224, 225; and postmodernism, 6, 14, 65, 73; The Ambassadors, xii–
201, 206, 207, 208, 225; psychic xiii, xiii, xv, 7, 14, 15, 16, 38, 51, 57,
geography of, 199, 205, 208, 212, 58, 73, 116, 152, 156, 167, 176, 228
218, 221, 226; and psychoanalysis, Hollier, Denis, 56, 63, 64;
207, 208; and recording “Surrealist Precipitates,” 238n16
instruments, 221; and Sigmund Holofernes (biblical figure), 54, 55
Freud’s modernist collection, Hommage à D. A. F. de Sade (Ray),
6, 214; and the spectral, 218; 44, 47–50, 47, 92, 93–94
and spiritualist automatism, Homme d’affaires (Ray), 35, 236n13
204; and surrealism, 202, 212, Hôtel du Pavot, Chambre
225; and surrealist automatism, (Tanning), 146, 202
203, 204, 212, 223, 226; and House #3 (Woodman), 154, 154,
surrealist ghostliness, 201, 203, 155, 156
204, 225; and Thomas Charles Howald, Ferdinand, 25–26
Lethbridge, 210; and touch, 207; Hubbard, Sue, 253n8, 254n10
tourist souvenirs of, 222; and Hugo, Victor, 252n20; Hunchback
transformation, 207; Walter of Notre Dame, 191
Benjamin’s influence on, 218–19, the human, 50, 51, 57; Claude
220; at West Dean College, 204 Cahun and, 57, 92–93; Dorothea
Hiller, Susan, works of: After Tanning and, 119, 121, 125; Lee
the Freud Museum, 206, 218, Miller and, 92–93, 95, 98, 108
223; A’shiwi, 221; At the Freud Human Frontier (Frontière
Museum, 202, 205–06, 207; humaine) (Cahun), 5, 55–63, 58,
Cowgirl, 211, 222–23, 223; 65, 66, 239n29
Eaux-de-vie, 212; Ενχη, 211, 211; The Human Head (Miller), 95
From India to the Planet Mars, Hunchback of Notre Dame (Hugo),
253n6; From the Freud Museum, 191
6, 201–03, 202, 205, 206, 207, Hutchison, Sharla, 238n18
211, 212, 214, 215, 220, 223, 224, Huyen, Jacques, 252n19
225, 254n11; Führer, 218; Hades, hypnosis, 1, 227
211; The Myth of Primitivism, Hyppolite, Hector, 233n5
203; Occult, 209; Plight, 222;
Relequia, 219–20, 220; Sisters of Interior with Sudden Joy (Tanning),
Menon, 203–04; Sophia, 254n13; 139–40, 139, 142, 143, 144, 146
Virgula Divina, 210; “Working “Introduction to the Discourse on
through Objects,” 214 the Paucity of Reality” (Breton),
Hirsh, Faye, 168 41
Index 287
The Invisible Man (Dalí), 75 La Carnaval de Binche (Glotz),
Involuntary Sculptures (Sculptures 252n19
involontaires) (Brassaï and “Ladies Shot and Painted” (Caws),
Dalí), 67, 69–71, 70, 72, 78–82, 237n6
87, 104, 207, 241n1 La Femme (Ray), 23, 24, 25, 32
Isis (goddess), 134, 136 L’Afrique fantôme (Leiris), 73
La Grand Famille (Magritte),
Jay, Martin, 10 245n15
Jdanov, Andreï, 250n3 Lamba, Jacqueline, 127
John the Baptist, 238n15 Lampshade (Ray), 30
jokes, 25, 96, 98, 102. See also puns “La Nature double” (Conley),
Jolles, Adam, 10, 248n29, 252n15 246n11, 247n14
Jorn, Asger, 250n3, 250n5, 251n13 “The Language of Flowers”
Jouffroy, Alain, 139, 248n22 (Bataille), 141, 242n14
Judith (biblical figure), 54–56 La Promesse (Magritte), 111
La Révolution surréaliste, 39, 74,
Kachur, Lewis, 236n20 159, 223, 236n12, 242n18, 245n16
Keller, Corey, 152 L’Art Magique (Breton), 14
Kelly, Julia, 74 Lasalle, Honor, 239n27, 239n29
Kermode, Frank, 243n22 latencies, 18, 21, 32, 41, 77, 78, 131,
Kertesz, André: Distortions, 239n22 228; Dorothea Tanning and,
Kiki of Montparnasse: in Emak 131, 149; and force fields, 78; Lee
Bakia, 33, 40, 235n8; in Retour à Miller and, 112, 116, 131; Man
la raison, 29–32, 41–42, 48, 237n6 Ray and, 32, 33; in puns, 14; and
Kirker, Anne, 208 surrealism, 77; and surrealist
Kline, Katy, 239n29 ghostliness, xv, 12, 18, 39, 133;
Kokoli, Alexandra, 208 and surrealist objects, 18, 39, 133
Krauss, Rosalind, 10, 64, 65–66, 81, Le Baiser (Magritte), 111, 245n15
152, 240n32, 249n9; Bachelors, Leclercq, Sophie, 233n11
237n2, 240n31; and convulsive Lee Miller, Photographer
beauty, 104; and the informe, 62; (Livingston), 92
and “surreality,” 104 Lefebre, Jean, 186
Krieger, Barbara, 239n24 Leiris, Michel, 40, 49, 64, 65, 71,
Kuspit, Donald, 144 76, 85, 238n16; and College of
Sociology, 244n27; and Dakar-
Lacan, Jacques, 16; “On the Djibouti mission, 71, 244n27;
Baroque,” 242n13 and dance, 85; and ghostliness,
288 Index
73–74; and headlessness, 56; in Livingston, Jane, 90, 99, 105,
Minotaure, 74–75; and W. B. 244n2; Lee Miller, Photographer,
Seabrook, 244n4 92
Leiris, Michel, works of: “Dogon “L’Objet fantôme” (Breton), 38, 41
Masks,” 73–74; L’Afrique L’Oiseau du ciel (Magritte), 245n15
fantôme, 73; Manhood, 56; Lomas, David, 242n16
“Summary Instructions,” 74 Luca, Ghérasim, 42–43
Le Journal littéraire, 54
Le Mercure de France, 54 Mad Love (Breton), 42, 107–08, 135,
L’Entrée en scène (Magritte), 245n15 138, 236n16, 241n4
Leperlier, François, 63, 240n33 Maffesoli, Michel, 242n13, 248n6
Le Petit Marquis (Tanning), 247n15 The Magnetic Fields (Breton), 3, 66,
Le Repos de l’esprit (Magritte), 110, 199, 225
245n15 magnetic somnambulance, 1. See
Le Retour (Magritte), 111, 245n15 also hypnosis
Lesage, Augustin, 233n5 magnetism, 5
Les Mystères du château du dé magnification, 17, 28, 65, 69, 78,
(Ray), 5, 27, 38–39, 41 80, 87
Le Surréalisme au service de la Magritte, René, works of: La Grand
révolution, 48, 74, 92, 236n15, Famille, 245n15; La Promesse,
236n18 111; Le Baiser, 111, 245n15;
“Le Surréalisme et la peinture” L’Entrée en scène, 245n15; Le
(Breton), 236n12 Repos de l’esprit, 245n15; Le
Lethbridge, Thomas Charles, 210 Retour, 111, 245n15; L’Oiseau du
Lethe River, 212 ciel, 245n15
L’Etoile de mer (Ray), 5, 27, 36–39, Mahon, Alice, 124, 130
40, 237n5 Malbert, Roger, 204, 253n2
Levy, Julian, 98 Maldoror Gallery, 249n8
Lewis, Matthew, 162; The Monk, Malherbe, Suzanne. See Moore,
2, 122 Marcel
L’Homme (Ray), 23, 24, 25 Mallarmé, Stéphane: “A Throw of
Lieberman, William, 238n12 the Dice Never Will Abolish
Liechtenstein, Therese, 239n23, Chance,” 39
239n29 Malt, Johanna, 236n14
Lionel-Marie, Annick, 69 Man (Ray), 24, 25, 32, 36
Lippard, Lucy, 204 Manet, Édouard: Déjeuner sur
Littérature, 13 l’herbe, 112
Index 289
Manhood (Leiris), 56 Metropolitan Museum of Art,
manifestations, xv, 12, 14. See also 238n12
latencies Meyer, Stephenie, 7
“Manifesto of Surrealism” Michals, Duane, 168
(Breton), xi, 2, 6, 16, 18, 32, 39, middle distance, 132, 133, 149
61, 97, 120, 122, 136, 142, 149, 158, Mileaf, Janine, 9, 87, 244n4; Please
160, 181, 183, 250n5 Touch, 26, 233n9
mannequins, 39, 40, 41, 168 Miller, Erik, 98
Marey, Etienne-Jules, 31, 34–35 Miller, F. K., 249n11
Marie (of Hungary), 190, 252n19 Miller, Lee, xiii, xiv, 5, 48, 49, 89,
Marinus, Albert, 252n19 91–117, 131, 167, 236n12, 244nn3–
Martin, Annabel, 236n11 4, 245n12; and anamorphosis,
the marvelous, 39, 96, 233n6 94, 97, 114–15, 116, 168; André
Marx, Karl, 7, 11 Breton’s influence on, 114; and
masks, 76, 77, 80, 81, 86, 88; Brassaï automatism, 108, 159; and the
and, 87; Claude Cahun and, body-tent, 110, 112, 155; Claude
60, 63; Michel Leiris and, 78; Cahun’s influence on, 91; and
Salvador Dalí and, 87; Susan clouds, 108; and colonialist
Hiller and, 209. See also perspective, 106–07; and
doubling corporeal puns, 110, 155; and
Masschelein, Anneleen, 7, 230 the counter-archive, 104; and
Masson, André, 50 doubling, 96, 98, 106, 110–12,
Mauss, Marcel, 235n4 116; in Egypt, xiv, 98, 100, 102;
McAra, Catriona, 124; Egyptian photographs of, xiii,
“(Re)reading (Post-)Surrealism xiv, 15, 98–100, 102, 104, 105, 112,
through Dorothea Tanning’s 115–17, 121; and ethnographic
Chasm,” 246n1 gaze, 107; and gender, 48,
McClintock, Anne, 107 91–93, 98, 101, 107, 108; and
McEvilley, Thomas, 74 ghost images, xiii, xiv, 5, 91,
mediumistic art, 76 93; and ghostliness, 95, 101–02,
“The Mediums Enter” (Breton), 1, 3 105, 114, 117, 177; and ghosts,
Medusa (mythological figure), 134, 114, 115; and headlessness,
136, 247n13 93–95; and human experience,
Melusina (mythological figure), 108; latencies in work of, 112,
135, 136 116, 131; and Man Ray, 112;
Mesmer, Franz Anton, 2 marriages of, 98, 112; and the
Metcalf, Jennie, 222–23, 224 marvelous, 96; and Minotaure,
290 Index
98; and modernism, 95, 96, 102–05, 103, 106, 113; Tanja
100, 102; and mortality, 91, 116; Ramm and the Belljar, Variant
in New York, 98, 99, 100, 112; on Hommage à D. A. F. de Sade,
Paris years of, 91, 95, 99, 100; 91–95, 92; Under the Belljar,
and solarization, 92, 244n2; 94–95, 94, 138
and the spectral, 102; and Minotaur (mythological figure), 71
spirit photography, 53; and Minotaure, 67, 69, 70–71, 73–75, 78,
stereoscopes, 99–100, 107; and 82, 85, 88, 98, 243n22
stereoscopic effect, 102; and Miracle Shepherd (Natterer), 251n10
surrealism, 204; as surrealist, Mnemosyne River, 212
100; and surrealist ghostliness, modernism, 19, 95–96, 100, 206
91, 96, 97, 98, 108, 166; and Modern Style, 76, 83, 85, 88;
surrealist joke, 96, 102; and architecture and, 70, 75, 76, 81,
surrealist objects, 101–02; and 84; and the archive, 83; objects
surrealist photography, 91, and, 82; Salvador Dalí and, 70,
101–02, 177; and touch, 99–100; 75, 82–83, 243n23; sculpture
visual puns in work of, 91, 96, and, 88. See also Art Nouveau
98, 102; and Vogue, 245n11; Moholo-Nagy, Lázló, 252n2
and Wadi Natrun monasteries, Monahan, Laurie, 57, 239n19,
100–101; and World War II, 115, 239n29
245n11 The Monk (Lewis), 2, 122
Miller, Lee, works of: The Cloud Moore, Marcel, 47, 237n3
Factory (Sacks of Cotton), 105– Morgan, Stuart, 204
06, 105, 107, 108; Domes of the Morrison, Toni, 7
Church of the Virgin (al Adhra), mortality, xii, xv, 7, 38, 52, 54, 56,
Deir el Soriano Monastery, 167, 227
xiii, 100–102, 101, 104, 106, 107; A Mrs. Radcliffe Called Today
Exploding Hand, 95–96, 96; (Tanning), 122, 137
Floating Head, Portrait of Mary Mueller, Elise. See Smith, Hélène
Taylor, 244n5; From the Top Mundy, Jennifer, 238n12
of the Great Pyramid, xiv, 108, Murmurs (Tanning), 148–49, 147
112–13, 113, 114–16; The Human Museum of Modern Art, 138, 241n6
Head, 95; Nude Bent Forward, Muybridge, Eadweard, 25
97, 97; Picnic, 112; Portrait and The Mysteries of Udolpho
Space, 108–10, 109, 111–12, 114, (Radcliffe), 122
155, 245n14; The Procession The Myth of Primitivism (Hiller),
(Bird Tracks in the Sand), 203
Index 291
Nadja (Breton), 38, 63, 84, 133, 138, Palaestra (Tanning), 123, 127–28,
153, 165, 248n2, 253n6 128, 129, 140, 141
Natterer, August: Miracle Shepherd, palimpsest, 177, 180, 192, 198
251n10 Papers of Surrealism, 252n1, 253n2
“Negro Sculpture” (Einstein), 76 the paranormal, 3, 7. See also the
Nelson, Val, 237n3 spectral; the supernatural
Newton, Isaac, 2 The Passion of Joan of Arc (Dreyer),
Nguyen, Stephanie, 246n3 249n15
Nickel, Douglas, 106–07 Paz, Octavio, 186–87
Nieuwenhuys, Constant, 181, 182, Pearce, Susan, 25
250n3, 251n6, 251n13 Pedersen, Carl-Henning, 250n3
Nochlin, Linda, 246n9 Pedicini, Isabella, 249n9
Noiret, Joseph, 181, 250n3 Pelote d’épingles pouvant servir de
non-Western objects, 77, 78, 80, fétiche (Fetish) (Tanning), 119,
87, 144, 229. See also African 120, 142, 143, 144
objects Penrose, Antony, 91–92, 101, 106,
Nude Bent Forward (Miller), 97, 97 111, 237n5
Penrose, Roland, 112, 244n6
objects, 205, 207, 208, 210, 212–13, The Perfect Medium (Chéroux and
217, 225, 229. See also found Fischer), 7
objects; surrealist objects Perfume (Stamelman), 237n2
“The Objects Revealed in Surrealist Perl, Jed, 235n2
Experiment” (Dalí), 82 Phantasmagoria (Warner), 7
the occult, 2, 226 the phantom, 82, 84. See also the
Occult (Hiller), 209 paranormal; the spectral; the
On Being an Angel (Woodman), supernatural
171, 172, 173, 173, 174 The Phenomenon of Ecstasy (Dalí),
“On Some Motifs in Baudelaire” 243n23
(Benjamin), 12, 27 Philadelphia Museum of Art, 246n7
“On the Baroque” (Lacan), 242n13 Phillips, Sandra, 235n8
orientalist perspective. See photograms, 104, 235n2. See also
colonialist perspective rayographs
Ovid: “Heroides,” 54–56 photography, 7, 46, 51, 58, 62, 67,
71, 81, 104, 110, 115, 164, 165,
Pacific Islands, 29, 34, 76, 77, 144 241n35; and the archive, 54;
Page d’atlas universel (I–X) Brassaï and, 71; and doubleness,
(Alechinsky), 179–80, 188–200, 54; and ghostliness, 7, 67, 164;
193, 195, 202 and mortality, 54; as recording
292 Index
instrument, 152; Salvador Dalí profane illumination, 72, 78
and, 81, 11; and the spectral, 104; psychic geography, 5–8, 91, 148,
and surrealist ghostliness, 91; 199; Sigmund Freud and, 205,
as transformation, 72. See also 218; Susan Hiller and, 205, 208,
realist photography; surrealist 212, 218, 221, 226
photography psychic illumination, 78
photomontage, 59–60. See also psychic intensity, 165–66
collage psychoanalysis, 15, 71, 89, 212, 215,
Picabia, Francis, 13 229; and found objects, 209;
“Picasso, Africa, and the Schemata and psychoanalytical method,
of Difference” (Gikandi), 244n26 216–17; and surrealism, 2; Susan
Picasso, Pablo, 42 Hiller and, 207, 208
Picnic (Miller), 112 puns, 12–15, 19, 25, 41, 228. See also
Pierre Colle Gallery, 75, 81 corporeal puns; doubling; jokes
Plato, 132
Please Touch (Mileaf), 26, 233n9 Rabelais, Francois, 191
Plight (Hiller), 222 Radcliffe, Ann, 2, 122, 125, 128, 134,
Pollock, Jackson, 255n17 162; The Mysteries of Udolpho,
Pollack and Shamanism, 255n17 122
Poppins, Mary, 171 Ramm, Tanja, 48–49, 51, 91–95, 98,
Portrait and Space (Miller), 108–10, 138, 244n3
109, 111–12, 114, 155, 245n14 Rankin, Sloan, 163, 165, 177
Posner, Helaine, 249n11 Rapture (Tanning), 246n4
postmodernism, 6, 201, 206, 207, Ray, May, xiv, 5, 21–44, 45, 47,
208, 230 74, 77, 78, 87, 167, 218, 235n2,
post-postmodernism, xv 235n10, 236n12, 244n3, 249n11;
“The Pretty Redhead” and anamorphosis, 30, 168; and
(Apollinaire), 227 crystals, 35; and doubling, 25,
the primitive, 76, 77 36, 43; films of, 5, 27–39, 41, 43,
primitive flow, 76, 77, 78 140; friendship of, with Robert
Primitivism, 74, 241n6 Desnos, 48; and ghostliness, 21,
Prin, Alice. See Kiki of 22, 34, 35, 41, 53; influence of,
Montparnasse on Francesca Woodman, 168;
Prinzhorn, Hans, 251n11; Artistry of Lee Miller and, 91–94, 112; and
the Mentally Ill, 182 Le Surréalisme au service de la
The Procession (Bird Tracks in the révolution, 92; and objects, 21,
Sand) (Miller), 102–05, 103, 34–36; and rayographs, 25, 26,
106, 113 27, 30, 81; and readymades, 9, 22;
Index 293
Ray, May (continued) Relequia (Hiller), 219–20, 220
and rhythm of automatism, Retour à la raison (Ray), 27, 29–32,
33, 43; and touch, 26, 75; and 31, 33–34, 35, 40, 41, 48, 71,
transformation, 21; and the 237n6
unconscious, 33 Revel, Jean-François, 79
Ray, Man, works of: “The Age of Rhode Island School of Design, 152
Light,” 38; Anatomies, 245n9; rhythm of automatism, 8, 12, 33,
Champs délicieux (Rayogram), 43, 49. See also suspension and
24; Dancer/Danger, 30, 42; flow
Emak Bakia, 5, 27, 33–36, 37, Rice, Anne, 7
40, 258n8; Hommage à D. A. Riches, Harriet, 249n11
F. de Sade, 44, 47–50, 47, 92, Richman, Michèle, 83, 89, 241n9
93–94; Homme d’affaires, 35, Riffaterre, Michael, 234n13
236n13; La Femme, 23, 24, 25, Rigaut, Jacques, 35–36
32; Lampshade, 30; Les Mystères Rimbaud, Arthur, 4, 140, 142, 149
du château du dé, 5, 27, 38–39, Rivière, Joan, 239n28
41; L’Etoile de mer, 5, 27, 36–39, Robert Desnos, Surrealism, and
40, 237n5; L’Homme, 23, 24, 25; the Marvelous in Everyday Life
Man, 24, 25, 32, 36; Retour à (Conley), 246n11, 248n6
la raison, 27, 29–32, 31; 33–34, Roberts, John, 8, 46, 62, 70, 104,
35, 40, 41, 48, 71, 237n6; Self- 240n32
Portrait, 22, 22, 24, 26; Woman, Robinson, Denise: “Thought
24, 25, 36 Burned Alive,” 253n8
rayographs, 25, 26, 27, 30, 40, 81. Rosemont, Franklin: What Is
See also photograms Surrealism? 234n20
“(Re)reading (Post-)Surrealism Roue libre (Free Wheel)
through Dorothea Tanning’s (Alechinsky), 184–85
Chasm” (McAra), 246n1 Rothman, Roger, 80
readymades, 9, 22, 207 Rowling, J. K., 7
realist photography, 62, 64, 240n32 “Rrose Sélavy” poems: doubling
recording instruments, 16, 20, 158; in, 14, 80, 81; Marcel Duchamp
in The Ambassadors, 16; André and, 188; Robert Desnos and, 1,
Breton and, 49, 140, 158; bodies 13–15, 65, 80, 81, 184, 209
as, 16, 165; Francesca Woodman
and, 158, 176; ghosts as, 176; Sabattier, Armand, 244n2
photographs as, 158; surrealism Said, Edward, 106
and, 16, 120; Susan Hiller and, Saint Mark’s Basilica, 171
221 Salomé (biblical figure), 238n15
294 Index
Santner, Eric, 234n21 the spectral, 7, 102, 104, 134, 136,
Saturday Night Live, 61 150, 218. See also ghosts; the
Schwartz, Arturo, 22–24 paranormal; the supernatural
Schwob, Lucy. See Cahun, Claude Spectres of Marx (Derrida), 7
sculpture, 34, 40, 75, 76, 82, 119 spirit photography, 3, 33, 41, 52, 53,
Seabrook, W. B., 244n4 72, 151, 156
“Second Manifesto of Surrealism” spiritualism, 1–3, 53, 72, 86, 191;
(Breton), xi, 246n10 and chance, 230; Fox sisters
The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí and, 1; Francesca Woodman
(Dalí), 243n21 and, 151; and ghostliness, 3,
Seguy, Monique, 244n7 8, 86, 230; ghost of, 3, 4, 66,
Sélavy, Rrose, 46; Marcel Duchamp 120, 131, 182, 198, 203; and the
as, 13, 24, 45, 188; Robert gothic, 5; and hypnosis, 1; link
Desnos as, xi, 13. See also “Rrose of, to surrealism, 52, 120; and
Sélavy” poems magnetism, 5; mediums in, 128,
Self-Portrait (Ray), 22, 22, 24, 26 192; and psychoanalysis, 5; and
Sengaï (monk), 185, 199 surrealist ghostliness, 227
Sequestrienne (Tanning), 133 spiritualist automatism, 3, 4, 204.
seraphim, 171 See also automatism
7 Spectral Perils (Les 7 Périls spiritualists, 1, 66, 81, 226
Spectraux) (Tanning), 134–40, spontaneity, 181, 182, 185, 250n3
134, 137 Stamelman, Richard, 48–49, 60,
Shad, Christian, 235n2 237n9, 241n5, 241n35; Perfume,
Shakespeare, William, 7 237n2
Shelton, Anthony, 248n25 St. Aubert, Emily, 122, 128, 134, 136,
Sheringham, Michael, 19, 234n20 245n5
Sherman, Cindy, 168 Stedman, Carolyn, 254n15
Sicilian baroque, 69–70, 76 stereoscopes, 99–100, 102, 106, 107
Sisters of Menon (Hiller), 203–04 stillness and motion, 191, 228. See
Situationist International, 251n13 also rhythm of automatism;
Smith, Hélène, 253n6 suspension and flow
solarization, 92, 244n2 Stokvis, Willemijn, 184
Solomon-Godeau, Abigail, straight photography. See realist
239nn27–29, 249n11 photography
Sophia (Hiller), 254n13 Strauss, David Levi, 160, 249n11
Soupault, Philippe, 110, 199, 225 sublime point, xi, xiii, 131, 149,
Space2 (Woodman), 161–62, 162, 246n10
163, 165–66, 166, 168, 170 subliminal messages, 5, 75, 78
Index 295
Suleiman, Susan, 237n10 and surrealist anamorphosis,
“Summary Instructions” (Leiris), 14, 15; and textual puns, 13–14;
74 and touch, 9, 10, 11; and visual
Sundell, Margaret, 156 puns, 14
“Sunflower” (Breton), 127, 250n17 surrealist mediums, 192
sunflower motif, 126–27, 129 surrealist objects, 33, 38, 41, 81, 86,
the supernatural, 5, 7, 123, 138, 162. 117, 208–09; African objects as,
See also the paranormal; the 29, 144; and force fields, 66; and
spectral ghosts, 207; graffiti as, 77–78,
“Surrealism, the Last Snapshot of 117; Lee Miller and, 101–02;
the European Intelligentsia” Man Ray’s films as, 33, 35, 42;
(Benjamin), 243n1 Pacific Island objects as, 29;
Surrealism and Painting (Breton), Salvador Dalí and, 74–75; and
4, 37, 114, 233n3, 234n16, 251n7 touch, 75; Walter Benjamin’s
Surrealism: Desire Unbound, works as, 29
238n12 “Surrealist Objects” (Dalí), 236n18
surrealist anamorphosis, 15, 155. surrealist photography, 46, 53,
See also anamorphosis 58–59, 62, 65, 67, 70
Surrealist Art and Thought in the “Surrealist Precipitates” (Hollier),
1930s (Harris), 241n2 238n16
surrealist automatism, 76, 127, 140, Surrealist Revolutionary Group,
203, 212, 226, 227–28, 250n5. See 179
also automatism suspension and flow, 8, 88, 185,
surrealist baroque, 76, 133, 151, 154 188–191. See also automatism;
surrealist ghostliness, 6–7, 79, rhythm of automatism
82, 86, 89, 91, 121, 226, 227–31, Sypher, Wylie, 242n13, 246n6,
243n20; and the archive, 8–9; 248n5
and aura, 11, 12; and automatic
practice, 8; and automatic tactility. See touch
trances, 13–14; and corporeal Talbot, Henry Fox, 245n10
puns, 15–17; and doubling, Tango (Tanning), 139–40
12–13; four characteristics of, Tanguy, Yves, 237n4, 251n15
8–19; and latencies, 12; link Tanja Ramm and the Belljar,
of, to spiritualism, 1, 3, 4; Variant on Hommage à D. A. F.
and rhythm of automatism, de Sade (Miller), 91–95, 92
8; and sensual aspects of Tanning, Dorothea, xiv, 6, 119–150,
surrealist experience, 9–10; and 175, 177, 186, 246n9, 247n15,
spiritualist automatism, 3, 4–5; 248n26; and Alice character,
296 Index
124; and anamorphosis, 131; Tanning, Dorothea, works of:
André Breton’s influence on, Abyss, 122–23, 125, 128, 132, 145;
133; Ann Radcliffe’s influence Another Language of Flowers,
on, 122, 125; in Arizona, 122, 150; Avatar, 248n24; Between
123, 125; and Arthur Rimbaud, Lives, 132, 133, 142, 149; Birthday
149; and automatic experience, (memoir), 132, 133; Birthday
159; and Bretonian surrealism, (painting), 129–33, 129, 135,
133–35, 142; and chance, 135, 142; Canapé en temps de pluie
139; compared with Francesca (Rainy-Day Canapé), 145–46,
Woodman, 152, 154, 163, 174; 146; Chasm, 112, 119, 122, 123,
and dance, 142, 143; and 246n1; Children’s Games, 123–25,
domestic space, 6, 121, 124, 124, 140, 141, 143, 146; Door, 84,
137; and doubling, 148; and 146; Eine Kleine Nacktmusik,
the female body, 120–21; in 123, 125, 126, 127, 129, 140, 142;
France, 139, 142; and gender, Even the Young Girls, 143;
124–28; and ghostliness, 119, Fatala, 247n15; Guardian Angels,
120, 131, 133, 149, 150; and ghost 146, 247n16; Hôtel du Pavot,
of spiritualism, 131; and ghosts, Chambre, 146, 202; Interior with
120, 149; gothic heroines of, Sudden Joy, 139–40, 139, 142,
122–28; and the human, 119, 121, 143, 144, 146; Le Petit Marquis,
125; and latencies, 131, 133, 149; 247n15; A Mrs. Radcliffe Called
and Max Ernst, 122, 132, 139, Today, 122, 137; Murmurs,
247n21; and middle distance, 148–49, 147; Palaestra, 123,
132, 133, 149; and mortality, 127–28, 128, 129, 140, 141;
142; novels of, 119, 122, 162; Pelote d’épingles pouvant servir
paintings of, 122, 123, 152; and de fétiche (Fetish), 119, 120,
Philadelphia Museum of Art, 142, 143, 144; Rapture, 246n4;
246n7; psychic geography of, Sequestrienne, 133; 7 Spectral
148; and revolving bodies, 139– Perils (Les 7 Périls Spectraux),
40; sculpture of, 119, 122, 143, 134–40, 134, 137; Tango, 139–40
238n12; self-portrait of, 129; and Taoua, Phyllis, 242n12
sewing, 144–46; and sexuality, Tate Modern Museum, 206,
124, 125; and the spectral, 136, 238n12, 246n2
150; and the supernatural, 23; Tell, Hakan, 247n13
and surrealism, 127, 131, 204; tent-body. See body-tent
and surrealist automatism, 127; “The Terrifying and Edible Beauty
and touch, 119, 121–22, 139, 143, of Modern Style Architecture”
146, 149 (Dalí), 80, 82
Index 297
then at one point (Woodman), 157, the uncanny, 167
158–60, 161 the unconscious, 33
“Theses on the Philosophy of Under the Belljar (Miller), 94–95,
History” (Benjamin), 219 94, 138
“Third Manifesto of Surrealism” “Unpacking My Library”
(Desnos), 233n6 (Benjamin), 29, 218–19
Thirty-One Women, 142 Untitled (Cahun), 50
“Thought Burned Alive” Untitled (Woodman), 169
(Robinson), 253n8
“A Throw of the Dice Never Will van den Berg, Nanda, 239n28
Abolish Chance” (Mallarmé), Virgula Divina (Hiller), 210
39 Vogue, 245n11
Ting, Walasse, 184–85
touch, 9, 12, 26, 78; and African Walker, Ian, 46, 73–74, 240n32;
objects, 10, 11, 75; and “hapatic City Gorged with Dreams, 58
aesthetic,” 10; in Human Walker, Keith, 239n24
Frontier, 57–58, 60, 64; in Warehime, Marja, 72
Involuntary Sculptures, 78; and Warner, Marina, 206;
patina, 11; and rayographs, 26; Phantasmagoria, 7
and rhythm of automatism, “Wave of Dreams” (Aragon), 233n6
12; sculpture and, 11, 13; and Wells, Richard, 254n14
surrealism, 9, 143; and surrealist West Dean College, 204
objects, 75; and surrealist “What Is Surrealism?” (Breton),
photography, 53, 67; Tristan 234n20
Tzara and, 11, 75, 146, 207 What Is Surrealism? (Rosemont),
Townsend, Chris, 152–53, 159, 168, 234n20
248n1, 249n11 Wheeler, Arthur, 34
transformation, 21, 27, 72, 88, 161 Wheeler, Rose, 34
transvestism, 61 “When Things Dream” (Tzara), 26
Trocadéro Museum of Woman (Ray), 24, 25, 36
Ethnography, 71 “Woman in the Bottle” (Conley),
Tzara, Tristan, 11, 12, 26, 29, 75, 146, 236n17
207, 248n29 The Wonder and Horror of the
Tzara, Tristan, works of: Coeur Human Head, 95
à barbe (Bearded Heart), The Wonderful Book (de Massot),
29; “Concerning a Certain 252n17
Automatism of Taste,” 10, 78; Woodman, Francesca, xiv, 6,
“When Things Dream,” 26 151–77, 180, 189, 249n10; and
298 Index
anamorphic impressions, 156, 165, 166; and spiritualism,
155–56; and anamorphosis, 168; 151; suicide of, 152; surrealist
and automatic writing, 158, 165, ghostliness and, 151, 154, 165,
173; and automatism, 155, 158, 167, 176; and touch, 155, 165; and
165; and the baroque, 6, 151, transformation, 163, 165, 175;
155, 163; and Botticelli Venus, and the uncanny, 167
160; Colorado photographs Woodman, Francesca, works of:
of, 152; Dorothea Tanning’s House #3, 154, 154, 155, 156; On
influence on, 175; and doubling, Being an Angel, 171, 172, 173,
152; Francis Bacon’s influence 173, 174; Space2, 161–62, 162,
on, 151, 173; and gender, 159; as 163, 165–66, 166, 168, 170; then
ghost, 165, 167; and ghostliness, at one point, 157, 158–60, 161;
151, 153–54, 156, 161, 164, 176; and Untitled, 169
ghosts, 154–56, 164, 165, 167–68; Woods, Alan, 218, 219
and the gothic, 151–52, 154, “The Word” (Eluard), 16–17, 155
162–63, 169, 170; and Italy, 161, “Working through Objects”
171, 172, 173; and mortality, 167; (Hiller), 214
and palimpsestic effect, 177; and “The Work of Art in the Age of
photography, 152, 164, 165, 166, Reproduction” (Benjamin), 11,
168; Providence photographs 27, 75, 218
of, 156, 158–60, 161, 163, 171; and World War I, 1, 3, 12, 205, 227
psychic intensity, 165–66; and World War II, 98, 115, 181, 201, 205,
recording instruments, 158, 165, 208, 238n12, 239n25, 245n11
176; and Rhode Island School Wright, Elizabeth, 61
of Design, 152; Robert Desnos’s
influence on, 151, 154, 155, 175, Zachman, Gayle, 58
176; self-portraits of, 152; and Ziarek, Krzysztof, 248n4
spirit photography, 53, 151, Žižek, Slavoj, 16
Index 299

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Surrealist Ghostliness

University of Nebraska Press

Acknowledgments for the use of

All rights reserved

Publication of this volume was assisted

Set in Minion by Laura Wellington.

Illustrations 6 Man Ray, Champs délicieux

way as to make them almost indistinguishable from each other. For

I wish to thank those who have been generous about welcoming my

Earlier versions of parts of the introduction and chapters 1, 2, 3, 5, 6,

Surrealism was a haunted movement from the beginning. It began

The Gothic Imagination

The Psychic Geography of Surrealist Ghostliness

Four Characteristics of Surrealist Ghostliness

an iron impractically studded with nails, adding an emotional and

The prism of ghostliness allows a retrospective look at surrealism

They were furious, they thought I was a bad electrician.

Man Ray made, photographed, and filmed objects he imbued with

be tampered with, modified” (9).1 By exposing the double life of

22 Man Ray’s Ghostly Objects

5. Man Ray, L’Homme

6. Man Ray, Champs

24 Man Ray’s Ghostly Objects

Man Ray’s Ghostly Objects 25

26 Man Ray’s Ghostly Objects

From Still to Moving Pictures

Man Ray’s Ghostly Objects 27

28 Man Ray’s Ghostly Objects

Man Ray’s Ghostly Objects 29

30 Man Ray’s Ghostly Objects

and montage to the chronophotography of Etienne-Jules Marey from

Man Ray’s Ghostly Objects 31

32 Man Ray’s Ghostly Objects

Man Ray’s Ghostly Objects 33

34 Man Ray’s Ghostly Objects

Man Ray’s Ghostly Objects 35

36 Man Ray’s Ghostly Objects

Man Ray’s Ghostly Objects 37

Les Mystères du château du dé

38 Man Ray’s Ghostly Objects

Man Ray’s Ghostly Objects 39

40 Man Ray’s Ghostly Objects

Man Ray’s Ghostly Objects 41

42 Man Ray’s Ghostly Objects

Man Ray’s Ghostly Objects 43

44 Man Ray’s Ghostly Objects

Les signes ont-ils un sexe? Mon multiple est humain.

Claude Cahun, born Lucy Schwob, questioned the Enlightenment

archives of off-beat Paris, illustrates the surrealist propensity for the

46 Claude Cahun’s Exploration

Heads at the Edge of Reason

9. Man Ray, Hommage à

Claude Cahun’s Exploration 47

48 Claude Cahun’s Exploration

Claude Cahun’s Exploration 49

Les Sans Cou (the “neckless” or “headless” ones, in punning homage

50 Claude Cahun’s Exploration

Claude Cahun’s Exploration 51

Spiritualism’s Photographic Ghost

52 Claude Cahun’s Exploration

Claude Cahun’s Exploration 53

Judith, Holofernes, and Autobiography:

54 Claude Cahun’s Exploration

Claude Cahun’s Exploration 55